5 ms·

CSS to Less

40 points by heroic 14y ago

shpoonj 14y ago
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.
huskyr 14y ago
The site seems to be down for now, but i suppose it's a lot like the css2sass tool: http://css2sass.heroku.com/ 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 14y ago
  > 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
chrisacky 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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
janlukacs 14y ago
the site is down!
- dansku 14y ago
  :( seems so!
- thomasp_ 14y ago
  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
nicooprat 14y ago
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 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 https://github.com/thomaspierson/libcss2less Thanks all guys for your feedback, much appreciated. Nico
- roman_m 14y ago
  Must say I really like the idea. It would be awesome to have same command line tool as lessc for reverse parsing.
  - thomasp_ 14y ago
    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
gulbrandr 14y ago
duplicate entry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898199 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898199 submitted 6 days ago
fady 14y ago
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/ http://css2sass.heroku.com/
tsycho 14y ago
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 http://rubygems.org/gems/lessify [2] http://lessifier.heroku.com/ http://lessifier.heroku.com/

40 points by heroic 14y ago

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.

huskyr 14y ago

The site seems to be down for now, but i suppose it's a lot like the css2sass tool: http://css2sass.heroku.com/ 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 14y ago
> 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

chrisacky 14y ago

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 14y ago
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

janlukacs 14y ago

the site is down!

dansku 14y ago
:( seems so!
thomasp_ 14y ago
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

nicooprat 14y ago

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 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 https://github.com/thomaspierson/libcss2less Thanks all guys for your feedback, much appreciated. Nico

roman_m 14y ago
Must say I really like the idea. It would be awesome to have same command line tool as lessc for reverse parsing.
- thomasp_ 14y ago
  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

gulbrandr 14y ago

duplicate entry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898199 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898199 submitted 6 days ago

fady 14y ago

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/ http://css2sass.heroku.com/

tsycho 14y ago

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 http://rubygems.org/gems/lessify [2] http://lessifier.heroku.com/ http://lessifier.heroku.com/