Sass, Pug, Haml, Slim, Stylus, and their friends all aim to make writing various bits of your frontend easier. And they mostly deliver on this primary promise. But they are all victims to the vagaries of open software development, and seem to have mostly fallen by the wayside. I loved using these through my career, so its with a bit of sadness that I realized I don't want to use them for new projects.
18% reduction (max) for learning a different language than html? Hard pass.
Especially with css you can give most of those small web design studios (and most wordpress plugins) a run for their money.
I think it’s unnecessary to learn some obscure „alt-sub-language“ if the improvement is so little.
I’m personally a big fan of SCSS over both CSS and regular Sass. Keeps the same syntax so it’s not hard to pick up, but fixes some of the CSS jank.
That said, I think they’re rolling out a new CSS version that covers some of those tweaks? I recall hearing abt that
CSS has been growing a lot of “super powers” lately, that used to require a pre-processor. Custom properties (variables), nesting,
calc, andcolor-mixused to be things we’d reach for a preprocessor for, but can now be done 100% in pure CSS. And generally, the CSS based versions are better than their old preprocessor counterparts.calccan mix units, so you can easily do things likecalc(100% - 1rem)to subtract a rem from 100% of the parent container. Can’t do that in Sass. Custom properties can be set by Javascript, or by media queries, and follow CSS scoping rules. Thats how I handle light/dark mode on my site.That sounds cool! I didn’t know that. Thanks for elaborating.
Well it’s pretty much just HTML without brackets and closing tags. There are a few oddities to enable this, and it falls down on inline styles (in the same way json fails vs XML for inline formatting), but it is still pretty fun to write
But with the issues these languages are starting to manifest, that 18% isn’t worth it anymore
Thanks for elaborating! :) TIL