I am having trouble finding information on this "normalize.less" thing I'm seeing in the Chrome 76 developer console. At the same spot in Firefox 69's console, it instead shows bootstrap.min.css so I'm guessing it's part of bootstrap, at least in my case. What is it though?
When I hover over it in Chrome, it pops up a filepath pointing to localhost/css/less/normalize.less but I don't have any folders under css, let alone one named less.
I've tried Googling "localhost css less" and "normalize.less" but am mostly finding various GitHub projects I'm not using and a few questions on here asking why less.css isn't working. I have no reason to think it's broken or getting in my way, I just have no idea what it is.
Also, to be clear, any mention here of normalize.css or less.css are from the search results I've seen. I'm focusing on normalize.less. (...they're not somehow the same thing or anything, are they?)
For the purpose of finding/seeing this reference to normalize.less:
What is it, and why did Chrome point me to an apparently non-existent file and folder? (bug?) Is there any relation between normalize.less, normalize.css, and less.css? Heck, what are .less files in general?
This is because the location of the bootstrap CSS file also has a .map file.
This file is used to indicate to the developer which file and which line is the attribute he wants to change, since the bootstrap.min.css file is nothing more than a large compilation of dozens of files.
Related
I'm on a Mac, macOS High Sierra 10.13.6
Since i updated Chrome a week or two ago, changes i make to CSS files (or SCSS for what its worth) will be saved correctly always, but Chrome will only refresh the styles in my page once. Local Overrides are disabled, Workspaces set up correctly, Source Maps are and have always been proper and in place. Nothing actually changed in my environment, other than updating Chrome.
I tried resetting all the caches, tried hard reloads, removing cache internals even. I tried anything i could think of. I researched online but was not able to find answers to this particular problem.
So to sum it up:
I open Chrome
I load my page locally (a localhost environment)
I open Developer Tools
I pick an element on my page
I click on the name of the resource on the right (a CSS or SCSS file)
I make changes to the source of the CSS/SCSS file file via the sources tab
I hit save. Changes are saved. Netbeans if open will immediately show the changes. If it was a SASS file, NetBeans triggers the compile on change
Chrome updates the styles in the page as it should
I make another change in Sources panel
I save the changes
Changes are saved – if NetBeans is open it will show the changes immediately and if it is a SASS file it will compile it
Chrome does not update the styles in the page. Never again until i reload.
I even reinstalled Chrome. Removed ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome entirely and restarted the browser after, starting off with a completely fresh profile. Still no jazz.
Can someone point me in the right direction here?
After my frustration went through the roof, i decided to meticulously cut down content from my rather large primary SCSS file for the page, reloading the page each time, trying and testing out making changes. Turns out the problem went away as soon as i removed a certain #import on top of the file. But other imports worked.
Why?
The imported file was for fonts. It contained various #font-face definitions. And on the bottom i had two `#import' statements referring to external resources via http.
I removed those and bingo – now Chrome was updating the styles properly with every change i made. Problem solved. Is this a bug? I don't know.
I then tried to place the imports directly in the main SCSS file on top, and even then they will cause the problem to occur.
The SASS documentation has this to say:
Plain CSS #imports
Because #import is also defined in CSS, Sass needs a way of compiling plain CSS
#imports without trying to import the files at compile time. To accomplish this, and to ensure SCSS is as much of a superset of CSS as possible, Sass will compile any #imports with the following characteristics to plain CSS imports:
Imports where the URL ends with .css.
Imports where the URL begins http:// or https://.
Imports where the URL is written as a url().
Imports that have media queries.
In other words, i basically wrote a normal CSS #import and while i have not tested this in other environments or systems, any such statements seem to break Chrome's ability to automatically update styles for a page after it was done once.
So to save others time who might stumble upon this: Get rid of your #imports and you'll be good.
The accepted answer of this question contains a good explanation.
I see this html template, and inspect it using Chrome inspection tool.
I'm surprised to know that my browser can detect the scss files instead of the compiled css one.
Then, I push Ctrl+U to view the page source, try to find 'scss' but it gives nothing in result.
So, how does the browser know the scss files?
P.S. I'm new to scss/sass/css pre-processor things
You can read this article for more about Sourcemaps: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/
This is mainly used for debugging and most of the times is stripted from production environments (in this case I guess they left it for people to check the actual source code and learn as you did :P)
What you are seeing is called Sourcemaps. Sourcemaps allow you to see the original source instead of the compiled CSS. This is usually used for debugging.
I'm really confused about LESS, which is still new to me. Bootstrap uses it, and I can see references to it in Chrome's style inspector, making references to a grid-framework.less file, but when I go looking on the hard drive for it in my project, it's not there. How is that even possible? When I did a grep followed by cut command to find which file was referencing grid-framework.less, I found it was in two files: bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css.map and bootstrap/css/bootstrap.css.map. And there, as well, I have no idea what .map files are either. I have much to learn.
So, in general, please explain what .map files are, and then explain how these load the .less file, and then explain how .less files are loaded in the browser, and how far back do browsers go before they won't process .less stuff from Bootstrap 3?
I have half a dozen CSS files inside the folder "client/CSS". In the local server it works fine but after deployment the website only seem to load the bootstrap.min.css file. Has anyone come across this? Thanks!
Meteor tries to compile all the css files it finds into one file. If you have css missing, meteor is probably failing on one of your files and giving up. When this has happened to me the issues were around unmatched brackets.
Try putting your css text into CSSLint or something like it, one at a time, and see if they have errors.
Some other discussion here that says #media and #imports lines might also be cause some issues depending on their use.
I'm using lesscss, the 'framework/compiler' for css. My IDE, dreamweaver, does not recognize .less as CSS. So no niceties such as error checking or code completion there. Is there anything I can do about that?
Dreamweaver can be configured to recognize "new" filetypes and treat them as editable under preferences. You can also edit some config files to help DreamWeaver figure out how to treat the files so it does code highlighting, etc., though in my experience, it does not always work as you would expect. On the other hand, can lesscss be configured to output .css files?
Here's an Adobe article on getting Dreamweaver to add new file types.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/164/tn_16410.html
less syntax highlighter extention
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=2756522#
You can force DW to "recognize the files" although not parsing as far as I know. This might be of help : http://blog.assortedgarbage.com/2012/03/using-dreamweaver-with-sass-and-less/ that might be of help
Try giving the extension: less.css, to your css file.
Example: styles.less.css.
This worked for me, but I still need a base stylesheet, such as: styles.css.
Also,
You can compile .less files to .css directly from within Dreamweaver using a free (Donation-ware) plugin:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=2692522
Dreamweaver has a very hard time with LESS, in my experience. It doesn't properly handle nesting and will color those as though they are syntax errors. However, it is mostly workable since the auto-complete does at least still work, and the overall coloring is okay on everything except nested items. (at least for me)
Also the extensions that are referenced above do not work on mac.
If you are having trouble getting DW to be able to open and color code LESS at all, try this--
1) Change some DW config files:
For Mac users, there are TWO configuration folders (at least for DW5.5). Two sets of identical files, FOUR in total files, have to be changed:
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Dreamweaver CS5.5/en_US/Configuration/DocumentTypes/MMDocumentTypes.xml
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Dreamweaver CS5.5/en_US/Configuration/Extensions.txt
and -
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5/Configuration/DocumentTypes/MMDocumentTypes.xml
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5/Configuration/Extensions.txt
And this technote tells you what exactly to change in those files:
http://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/kb/change-add-recognized-file-extensions.html
Install a LESS Compiler
and for those on mac, this little app works GREAT. All it does is watch your less files and automatically save them to css on save.
http://incident57.com/less/
I hope that is helpful to someone!
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=2756522#
This actually does all that and more, as CSS and less have a little different syntax specially when it comes to nesting rules inside one another.