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.
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-mix
used 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.calc
can 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.