Thoughs on LESS CSS

So if you don't know about LESS CSS it is a way to generate CSS given a LESS file/object which consists of a lose set of rules.  First impressions this seems really powerful - a way to generate CSS using programming logic.  The problem is that is only limited to generating CSS and not adding additional functionality to CSS.  So even though there is or maybe has been hype around CSS for a developer who is not a CSS developer this has little to no value to you.  In fact I would go as far to say that it has limited use for CSS developers.  Reason I say this is a website design tends not to have a lot of design which can be reused nor is it easy to predict the reuse.  Only real exception to this is website which have a big templating base such as Wordpress.  I can see making different colour themes template really useful but that is really where it ends.  So for me it gets put in the really cool category but I don't have business case for it.

Gumbo CSS Advanced Selectors are wicked

Well I was looking at the 360 MAX sessions and saw an item of interest on Advanced Item Rendering. As you do when your surfing the net I had a quick look at Joan Lafferty's blog and saw another interesting post about the new CSS Advanced Selectors in Gumbo. I had a read through and it is wicked the power the Advanced Selector now gives you. This really comes into it's own since now you can style hierarchically instead of globally. I see this taking CSS skinning to a new level for the skinning community.

A brief example of the difference below but for more go to CSS Advanced Selectors

If you wanted all Buttons in a VBox to be blue and all other Buttons to be red.

In Flex 2/3
You could do something like

Button {
 color: #FF0000;
}

.VBoxButton {
 color: #0000FF;
}

In Gumbo you can do this

Button {
 color: #FF0000;
}

VBox Button {
 color: #0000FF;
}

As you can see you don't need to create a hash class selector. I'm really looking forward to using the advance selector feature!