HTML vs. Java vs. Less vs. XML Comparison Chart

HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the markup language that is used by every website on the internet. HTML is code that websites use to build and structure every part of their website and web pages. HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML Living Standard. It is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a consortium of the major browser vendors (Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft). HTML5 includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves, and rationalizes the markup available for documents and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications. For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a candidate for cross-platform mobile applications.

Less (which stands for Leaner Style Sheets) is a backwards-compatible language extension for CSS. This is the official documentation for Less, the language and Less.js, the JavaScript tool that converts your Less styles to CSS styles. Because Less looks just like CSS, learning it is a breeze. Less only makes a few convenient additions to the CSS language, which is one of the reasons it can be learned so quickly. Mixins are a way of including ("mixing in") a bunch of properties from one rule-set into another rule-set. Less gives you the ability to use nesting instead of, or in combination with cascading.