18 Sep
2015
18 Sep
'15
12:10 p.m.
Hi Guillaume,
I would be in favor to add SASS and not replace Less with SASS if possible.
Since the next one PostCSS is based on standard CSS, we would have multiple
possibilities PostCSS, LESS+PostCSS or SASS+PostCSS.
Basically it means supporting one extended CSS language processor followed
by one or more standard CSS processors.
Do you think that you could make your code generic enough to support both
SASS and LESS, and be prepare to append PostCSS to the overall process ?
Having this flexibility will allow backward compatibility and be open to
the future.
I am not sure waiting is the way to go, we basically need more flexibility.
If you wait for something stable you risk to wait for ever.
Thanks,
On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 8:01 PM, vincent(a)massol.net <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
On 17 Sep 2015 at 18:59:22, Guillaume Louis-Marie Delhumeau (
gdelhumeau@xwiki.com(mailto:gdelhumeau@xwiki.com)) wrote:
--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
Hello everyone.
The front-end world is evolving really fast, and it's very hard to pick
the
good JavaScript framework, the good CSS
preprocessor, or the good CSS
toolkit. It's so unpredictable that it has inspired a comic strip:
http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/09/16/how-to-choose-the-right-javascript…
:)
Last year, we have chosen to use Bootstrap for our new Flamingo Skin.
Quickly, I have discovered that we had to integrate a CSS preprocessor to
be able to customize it [1]. The natural choice was Less, since Bootstrap
and of lot themes of the web were using it.
Now, the situation have changed. Bootstrap 4.0 will be released soon [2].
It have been entirely rewritten and some retro-incompatibilities have
been
made. But the most breaking change is that they
don't use Less anymore,
but
Sass.
By the past, they use a less-to-sass converter so they were able to
propose
both versions of the framework. But now, I doubt
the opposite converter
could be possible since Sass have more features than Less.
Worse, it seems that Sass is becoming more popular than Less [3].
Note: the current Bootstrap version, 3.x, will be maintained during one
year, so we have this time to adapt.
If we want to upgrade to Bootstrap 4, we will need to integrate the Sass
preprocessor. Fortunately, we can re-use a lot of the work that I've done
for Less (the cache mechanism, etc...) that I can modify to be more
generic. I don't have estimated the time it would take yet.
If we want to upgrade Flamingo to Bootstrap 4, it will create some css
breakage (and the ability to use LESS in SSX will be loose). And we will
have to convert our Less code to Sass.
We could also decide to keep Bootstrap 3.x in Flamingo and use Bootstrap
4
for our next skin.
Why couldn’t we use LESS in SSX since in the end it generates CSS?
Note that even SASS may not last very long (see this fun tweet:
https://twitter.com/mdo/status/591364406816079873?lang=en).
For example there’s postCSS now (and lots of others):
* https://twitter.com/jeremychone/status/636570198510735360
* https://github.com/postcss/postcss
* "PostCSS can do the same work as preprocessors like Sass, Less, and
Stylus. But PostCSS is modular, 3-30 times faster, and much more powerful."
* Some slides: http://ai.github.io/about-postcss/en/
Our only real solution would be to be able to have XWiki work with several
but I don’t know how hard it is to convert the bootstrap CSS files.
See for example https://github.com/OEvgeny/bootstrap-postcss
Since BS3 is pretty often used, I’m pretty sure people will develop
converters from LESS to SASS or others.
So I think it’s important that we wait a bit :) We should research the
topic though.
Thanks
-Vincent
Thanks,
[1]:
http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/ColorThemeforFlamingo#HImpl…
[2]: Bootstrap 4 announcement:
http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2015/08/19/bootstrap-4-alpha/
[3]: The State of Front-End Tooling – 2015:
http://ashleynolan.co.uk/blog/frontend-tooling-survey-2015-results
--
Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau(a)xwiki.com)
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