

CSS to Less - heroic
http://css2less.cc/

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chrisacky
It kind of works. I didn't really expect it to work for my mamotth 9000 line
CSS. Would be perfect for small projects though definitely.

I write in LESS to start with. So I took the compiled CSS from less, then
tried to run it through the css2less convertor, then recompile what it
generates.

Few things I noticed.

[1] Selectors get rearranged

[2] Cannot correctly handle base64 images

[3] Cannot handle child selectors. ie :child / n-th child.

[4] Comments get mangled (confirmed from another commentor below)

[5] Generates duplicate properties (where the duplicates didn't exist in
precompiled). Creating duplication properties is actually correct, such is the
case where you would want duplicate background properties (to support
IE/FF/Chrome gracefully etc). However, you don't want it to generate identical
properties where the values are also the same.

[6] font-faces wrong. (To be fair, this is hard to get right even in normal
LESS).

All constructive feedback. I'm still impressed that it did a fairly decent
job.

~~~
masklinn
Other things which would be nice:

* Correctly extract sets of compatibility (prefixed) properties into a mixin

* Extract and fix prefixed properties missing the unprefixed version and/or other prefixes

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nicooprat
Hi folks,

First thing, Css2less is hosted on our small server by home, so it's kind of
hard to handle the amount of today visits :)

Please be patient if server goes down for a few minutes...!

Second thing, I see a lot of good ideas here ! You should definitely propose
them on the Github page so it's not lost :

<https://github.com/nicooprat/Css2Less>

There's still a lot of work to accomplish as you expected it, so it's also the
occasion for me to make a call for ruby gurus who could helps us to add this
awesome features :

<https://github.com/thomaspierson/libcss2less>

Thanks all guys for your feedback, much appreciated. Nico

~~~
roman_m
Must say I really like the idea. It would be awesome to have same command line
tool as lessc for reverse parsing.

~~~
thomasp_
You could get a css2less command line by installing the rubygem : gem install
css2less

After that you can run for example : css2less style.css > style.less

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huskyr
The site seems to be down for now, but i suppose it's a lot like the css2sass
tool:

<http://css2sass.heroku.com/>

I've used that and it's quite a nice start, but you shouldn't really expect it
to be as good as hand-written LESS or SASS. Lots of the wins of using a
preprocessor is in defining good re-usable mixins and hierarchies, and a
conversion tool simply can't give you all of that.

IMHO if you want to use SASS/LESS, write all of it from scratch.

~~~
masklinn
> you shouldn't really expect it to be as good as hand-written LESS or SASS.

Even without that, I'd have expected it to _at least_ extract repeated color
values into variables, and maybe repeated propsets into mixins.

Because really, from a short test it does little more than me changing my
file's extension to .less/.scss

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tsycho
Some time back, I built a Ruby gem called lessify[1] and a webapp[2] to do
this. Maybe we should combine forces :)

[1] <http://rubygems.org/gems/lessify>

[2] <http://lessifier.heroku.com/>

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gulbrandr
duplicate entry: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898199>

submitted 6 days ago

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fady
this is a great idea, but i'm using the most recent version of chrome and i
find it to be very slow to just get the page open :\ otherwise, nice idea

i also liked the linked one in this thread as well:
<http://css2sass.heroku.com/>

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janlukacs
the site is down!

~~~
thomasp_
css2less website is home hosted on a small server with a small bw. And there
are lot of visiters today. We will move it on a bigger hosting soon. Meantime
you could use it locally with command line using the rubygem : gem install
css2less

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shpoonj
This would be great if it didn't strip comments and took your redundant css
and replaced it with a mixin.

Oh and if it declared variables for repeated values, I'd use it for sure.

edit: Just noticed it doesn't format prefixed properties neatly, lists
properties in a weird order, and for whatever reason, the order of elements
gets rearranged. That's a major issue... for some reason, my .container ended
up at the very bottom.

