Bringing the SASS

For a little while now, we’ve been looking into ways to improve our frontend build speed, scalability and maintainability. One of the ways we hope to achieve this is by adopting a CSS precompiler. After reading a couple of online articles, mostly the comparison between LESS and SASS, we chose the latter. I personally feel it offers a solution which is more in line with my own perceptions as well as being entirely suited to our needs.

What’s Sass / what’s the point?

Some of you may be familiar with SASS or LESS but for those who aren’t the point is simple; CSS is limited. Since styles first started to cascade little has changed in the language. “That’s nonsense!” I hear you cry, “We have had multiple layers of CSS released and there is so much in CSS3 we could have only dreamed of back then!”. True but on a fundamental level the way we write CSS has barely changed at all. If anything CSS3 (and the haphazard adoption process) has only highlighted this issue. So while we can do so much more with CSS now than ever before, the way we write it hasn’t changed. Is this a problem? Well, strictly speaking, no. There is nothing actually broken here, it’s just inefficient ¹. SASS is a CSS compiler which introduces variables, reusable chunks of code and some basic functions. The net result is that you should end up writing less code that is more easily maintained. For me this functionality is the logical progression from cascading styles and I felt that SASS, rather than any other CSS compiler, suited our needs best. If you doubt the benefits of this language try writing your next large javascript functions sans variables. Possible, but unpleasant.