CSS to Less | Hacker News Reader

CSS to Less

css2less.cc

40 pointsheroic14 comments

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

> 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

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/

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

submitted 6 days 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/

the site is down!

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

:( seems so!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com