Can I get DotLess to parse all my CSS files, (which may or may not include LESS code) instead of having to include .less files in my project? I am using DotNetNuke, and would love to just start adding LESS code to my existing CSS files.
Never tried it but I imagine you could change the type piece in your HTTP handlers.
Instead of path=".LESS" change it to path=".CSS"
Not sure if that would work or break something but it would be interesting to see if it would.
Related
I have been handed over a website that uses LESS to pre-process CSS. I need to update some styles, but I'm not sure if the previous developers had been modifying LESS files and then compiling the CSS, or if they lazily had just been editing the CSS directly.
I want to edit the LESS but I'm worried that I'll lose any changes the previous devs made to the CSS directly.
I don't know who the previous developers were or have access to their source control to see the file history.
Is there any way to check if the LESS file is in sync with the CSS file?
There is no way to reproduce LESS file from CSS file.
Try to keep a copy of the CSS file and try to compile again. Then compare the two CSS files.
I have a website which uses 1 css file, it is called body.css and it consists of 841 lines. Should it be sorted in different files (header.css, footer.css page1.css, etc...), is it better in just 1 file or does it not matter?
The only thing I know for sure is sorting it in more files is a lot more readable.
Also if someone answers this I'd be most grateful for a little explanation.
My opinion would be one of two things.
1) If you know that your CSS will NEVER change once you've built it, I'd build multiple CSS files in the development stage (for readability), and then manually combine them before going live (to reduce http requests)
2) If you know that you're going to change your CSS once in a while, and need to keep it readable, I would build separate files and use code (providing you're using some sort of programming language) to combine them at runtime build time (runtime minification/combination is a resource pig).
With either option I would highly recommend caching on the client side in order to further reduce http requests.
So, there are good reasons in both cases...
A solution that would allow you to get the best of both ideas would be :
To develop using several small CSS files
i.e. easier to develop
To have a build process for your application, that "combines" those files into one
That build process could also minify that big file, btw
It obviously means that your application must have some
configuration stuff that allows it to swith from "multi-files mode" to "mono-file mode".
And to use, in production, only the big file i.e. Single CSS
Result : faster loading pages
maybe this will help you..
For optimal performance it is better to have only one css file.
But for readability it would be better to have different files for different parts.
Take a look at tools like SASS, which help do that without sacrifice performance. Additionally it has features to make your files even more readable by introducing variables, function and much more.
Using more files means more requests. It will take more time to load and make unnecessary requests to the server. I'd stay with one file.
The only good reason to have other css files would be if you have third-party components, to keep them separated and be able to update them easily.
The order matters: Rules loaded later will override rules with the same name loaded before (this is valid even for rules in the same file).
What do you mean that your website uses one CSS file? Normally you'd write your style definitions in multiple files, and they are concatenated (or not) into one file. My point is, what you are working on in your development environment should stay modular, readable, it shouldn't be influenced by what you have in production.
As for the order of the CSS files, yes, it matters, as you can overwrite your previous definitions.
For optimal caching I'd recommend you to build all the vendor CSS in one file, and your CSS in another file, versioned, so that if you change something in your code, only that file has to be updated by the browser.
But these things depend on the infrastructure. As the browsers are able now to send multiple requests simultaneously, having multiple files can lead to faster page load than only one. But I'm not sure about this.
you might want to take a look at gulp to automatically optimize, and minify your CSS code.
All css in one file is OK.
But it's free : you can make as many css file as you want.
However usually this is how it is:
1 global css file for the entire page. You put the common css in here that is useful for every page on your site. You can call it app.css or style.css or mywebsite.css or any name you want.
1 specific css file for a specific page when you want to specially separate this css from the global css file. Because it will contains css only useful for a few pages. For example you have a special component made by your own or a special functionnality. Example : you have made a spcial javascript code working with some html for uploading some file and you want to have your code js/css separate.
Usually, you can also have one css page for each page, but always one global css file for the entire site.
Note : Same question is also valid for javascript
Note 2 : You can also think about using a framework to minify your javascript and css into one single css / js file at the end. At work our technical boss use wro4j which works for java but it should exists many more other frameworks as you can search on google.
I am collaborating with Senior Developers and quite embarrassed to ask why the code in all the .css files is on one line?! At first I thought it was minified but when I went to unminify it it said Unrecognized format. How do I work with these files? As far as I can see it's ONLY the .css files.
It can be the case they are using a CSS compiler (like SASS or LESS),
in that case the files won't have .css extension but .SASS, .SCSS,
.LESS which will be compiled into a single CSS. - Teknotica
Tecknotica's speculation was correct. So to be more specific this is how you would work with these files given a similar situation. You don't actually write CSS directly into the CSS file but instead add your CSS to a SCSS file that then gets compiled into the CSS file using a tool such as Grunt. The CSS is all on one line in the CSS file (the one you don't directly write to) apparently because it reduces to the number of requests to get the bits. Thanks for everyone's help & advice.
Ew, that's annoying. Usually when I come across that, I just do a search and replace for " ; " and add a break beneath it to help organize everything. Hope that helps!
As stated by Rob Dodson, style tags are now unavoidable with Web Components. I am trying to find a way to use LESS with this new tecnhology without having to paste the compiled CSS in my HTML document everytime I change something in the LESS file . Is there anyway to achieve that?
I am using Polymer.
Thanks!
Laurent
You can make the client compile the LESS to CSS , you should definitely take a look at this :
http://lesscss.org/#client-side-usage
It is advised to compile it yourself to css in a production environment though !
Doing this client-side hardly seems like the corrent solution, especially at scale. For instance, do you really want 1000 web components in your app all including LessCSS and compiling on the client side?
Just compile server-side and include the compiled version in your html import. Apps like DocPad, make this a lot easier. For instance:
src/documents/components/my-component/my-component.css.less is your source file, and is compiled to out/components/my-component/my-component.css, which is accessible at /compoennt/my-component/my-component.css.
We use this workflow to also make use of javascript pre-processors like coffeescript, as well as post-processors like css auto prefixer, and bundlers like Browserify. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23050527/130638 for more info.
Simply compile your less and embed the generated CSS file via good old link tag.
I don't think that rob wanted to say that using style tags is the only way to go. You can still link to external stylesheets as you always did.
Why don´t you compile on server side using php compiler? Have a look here - http://leafo.net/lessphp/ -
To let you know, i´m using this compiler on my projects, on the server side without any kind of problems!!!!!!! :) IMO, it´s better to have the compilation work on the server side. I´m not totally 100% sure, but i think IE8 don´t recognize text/less
The way I have done this before is have individual .less or .scss file for each component and have it compile into the individual .css file which is then called into the respective component file. and finally vulcanize everything into a single file.
Incase you want to use a single CSS file, then use //deep// combinator or ::shadow pseudo elements in the CSS.
If you able to create the custom elements without using ShadowDOM then you can simply have all your less merge into a single CSS.
Honestly speaking I was unable to create a wc without shadowDOM in polymer. There is a long conversation on github on enabling / disabling and hacking a way to create a wc without shadowDOM here https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/issues/222
One solution would be to have the preprocessor translate .less files into .css and then linking them inside Polymer components, like explained in the official documentation: https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling#external-stylesheets
Unfortunately this is deprecated. So the other way to go could be to have another step that wraps the preprocessor-generated css files with a dom-module: this way you can follow the Polymer way including the style module inside your components, or using the css file compiled from less if you do things outside Polymer components.
I'm using Gulp for my build process and I found this module very useful:
https://github.com/MaKleSoft/gulp-style-modules
It creates, for every .less file I have in my sources, an .html file with a dom-module wrapped around it, ready to be included in the components' styles.
By default SASS looks at the filename and determines whether to make a css file out of it. I'm wondering if there is a way to prevent this from happening.
We're building a large website and lots of front-end developers are editing the css, but we only have one dev server. Sure some things you can see happen locally, but often you can only see the real rendered way on the server.
So, when I push my compiled css file to the server, my co-workers' css gets clobbered until s/he commits and I do an svn:update, etc, etc.
However, if we were working in different SASS file, and those css files were getting created, I would only have to push up, say, the forms.css file instead of the whole thing.
Then for Production, we'd put it back to the way SASS normally works.
The only other way I can figure to do this is to do a mass rename of files, which seem very messy.
Thanks in advance.
The entire point of partials is that they don't get compiled into files. If you want a sass file to be turned into a css file, remove the underscore.
Your real problem seems the be that you're putting compiled CSS in your version control. Don't do that. Only commit Sass, and compile it into CSS server-side with a post-receive hook or something.