
Ask HN: Could browsers support parsing LESS and Sass natively? - nodesocket
Could and should browsers (Chrome &amp; Firefox) support native browser parsing of LESS and Sass? It would be great to not have to convert to css via a build system.
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nostrademons
Most of the best features of LESS and Sass are in proposed drafts of the CSS
spec:

CSS variables: [http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-
variables/](http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-variables/)

Calculated expressions: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/calc](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/calc)

Mixins are almost always used just to support multiple browser prefixes, and
so they go away as features graduate from being browser-specific to making it
into the spec. A number of prominent offenders (transition, transform, border-
radius, box-shadow) have already done this.

Nested rules are similar to <style scoped>. The latter is actually a bit more
powerful, since it gives true namespacing, but it's clunkier to use.
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/st...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/style)

Shadow DOM also gives style encapsulation: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Shadow_DOM)

Browser support for most of these features is pretty spotty:

[http://caniuse.com/#search=var](http://caniuse.com/#search=var)

[http://caniuse.com/#search=calc](http://caniuse.com/#search=calc)

[http://caniuse.com/#search=scoped](http://caniuse.com/#search=scoped)

[http://caniuse.com/#search=shadowdom](http://caniuse.com/#search=shadowdom)

