Do you recommend against javascript based LESS?

Question

After I watched this NetTUTs video, I'm very interested in trying out the LESS.js method shown.

Other than the obvious, "What if the user doesn't have javascript enabled?", or "There's going to be a small performance hit"... is there a reason this cannot be used in production?

LESS essentially looks like what CSS should be...

Answer 1

I can't see any reason why it should be used in production. It makes more sense to run this as a build script, then make the output (regular CSS) available on a cached cookie-free domain. Then, it works fine without JavaScript and doesn't require JavaScript processing (which will be slower than the CSS parsers written in tuned native code) on every page load.

Answer 2

I haven't tried in production, but there may be some interesting use cases around LESS variables. For example, you could change underlying less variables that in turn change a bunch of dependent CSS rules (relative widths/heights for example).

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/8742705/255961 for interesting patch that makes it very easy to change them using a simple modifyVars() function.

With it you could change your Bootstrap grid size and everything that depends on it with a single, local JS call:

less.modifyVars({
  '@gridColumnWidth': 50px
});

Answer 3

Yes, if people with Javascript disabled is a concern, then I would recommend against the Javascript-based LESS. Personally, I see no advantage in it over the Ruby-based one, since you really only need Ruby installed on your development machine - once you compile the .less file to a .css, there's no difference between a LESS-compiled .css file and "hand-written" one.