Leverage the LESS parser in the CSSRewriter

[gideonthomas]

We currently use our own parsing mechanisms and regexes to parse and rewrite CSS. However, we should probably use the LESS parser that brackets provides here instead so that we run into fewer parsing bugs.

[humphd]

The LESS version used in Brackets is older than the new docs. We have to use less.parser and .toCSS(). See https://github.com/adobe/brackets/blob/04efd92ae3d91ea70c6481a7e32e6e4f41676d55/src/utils/ExtensionUtils.js#L121-L131 for an idea of how to call the parser. I'm not sure how you pass a custom plugin so it will let us rewrite image URLs. See https://github.com/less/less-plugin-inline-urls/blob/master/lib/inline-images.js for some idea on how it might be done.

cc @Pomax.

[humphd]

It looks to me like Plugins were added in Less v2, so this might be tricky without also updating Less.

[humphd]

Maybe http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26607819/remove-properties-from-rendered-less-css/26610628#26610628 provides a way?

[Pomax]

small note: LESS<2 is incompatible with node v12, so you're going to want to update LESS regardless, if you want to keep the project runnable for people on the current version of Node

[humphd]

Looks like LESS v2.3.1 is coming upstream in the 1.4 milestone, see adobe#10240

[humphd]

We no longer ship LESS in production (for size/perf savings), so closing this.