Introducing LESS

If you've worked with style sheets within the last few years, there's no chance you won't have heard of LESS; however, for the sake of those who didn't, let's take a few words to talk about it. Before getting to that though, we must briefly introduce the concepts of style sheet language and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Note

This paragraph is mostly aimed at those who have never used LESS before. If you have some experience with LESS already or feel like you don't need to know anything else about why we'll use it, you might as well skip it entirely and jump to the next paragraph: Install and Configure LESS.

Style sheet languages

A style sheet language, also known as style language, is a programming language used to define the presentation layer's UI design rules of a structured document. We can think of it as a skin or a theme that we can apply to a logical item (the structured document) to change its appearance. For example, we can make it look blue, red, or yellow; we can...