Everyone loves LESS. After all, who isn't tired of typing all the browser prefixes to make some kick-ass CSS3? But don't you wish you could organize your LESS/CSS styles into some well-organized libraries, and then just serve a single file to the browser? Or render your page without relying on JavaScript or command-line geekery? Wouldn't it be great if you could just edit LESS, and then save CSS?

Page layout for tomorrow.
Set column and gutter widths, choose the number of columns, and switch between pixels and percentages.
All without any .grid_x classes in your markup. Oh, and did we mention it's responsive?
Runs on LESS, SCSS, or Stylus.

A lot is said about LESS and Sass, and for good reason. CSS is hell to get right and even harder to maintain. LESS and Sass (and similar tools) make CSS into a much more useful language.
But when people talk about why they are so great, they miss the main point. It is true that your style files are now shorter and more readable. However, there is something deeper going on than mere saving of keystrokes and being able to name things.
In this essay, I will try to put into words (and some pictures) what my intuition tells me as a developer and programming language enthusiast to clarify why CSS is innately unmaintainable, does not satisfy its own design goals, and why LESS and Sass make a bad language more bearable. I also will propose solutions which would raise the bar past the high level where LESS and Sass have taken it.

Here I comes with the next article in this article series. This article is about Nested Rules in LESS CSS. But before starting this article let’s have a look at what we have a covered so far.