CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptless
DroidOS
DroidOS

Reputation: 8890

LESS in IE throws exceptions

I am playing aorund with using LESS along with respond.js to streamline the development of a new site. Both LESS and respond are quite simply neat. However, with LESS in IE I have run into many problems.

For starters in IE8 mode my IE10 reported that id did not understand "map". No problems, I wrote up an Array.prototype map extension. Then it said that it did not understand isArray, once again in IE8 mode. Prototype extensions to the rescue again. Now it comes back saying something along the lines of SyntaxError: Invalid operand to 'in': Object expected

I am not in fact aware of what in might be but in any case I cannot keep adding adhoc prototype extenions on the fly in the hope that things will eventually settle down. Either LESS is unusable with IE or else someone here can point me to all the fixes needed to make it work.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 132

Answers (1)

Rafal Pastuszak
Rafal Pastuszak

Reputation: 3160

Answer for your question:

First of all, LESS client side compilation is supported only in IE9+. You could probably fix this using shims and polyfills for ES5, like these.

But please, don't.

What you should probably do (and forget the first part):

However, despite of really good caching mechanisms provided by the LESS compiler (eg. using localStorage to preserve generated code) using it i production isn't considered a good practice.

GruntJS and Bower.io work in the console, but are relatively easy to configure. Basically, you set them up once and forget they've ever existed:)

Livereload provides you with a GUI and it's incredibly easy to use.

I used GruntJS for frontend development with backend developers working with PHP (CakePHP, Zend, Laravel) and it made our lives much, much easier :)

It seems much more reasonable to streamline your frontend development workflow using a task runner like GruntJS or Brunch.io or install Livereload. These tools will monitor the file changes and generate a new CSS file on every save (and also, reload your CSS on the fly).

You can install GrunJS with watch and LESS plugins and keep is very simple this way. You could even use LESS Node.js package installed globally to the job.

Upvotes: 1

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