CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its most welcome features. But as our sites and apps get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts—has become a liability.
Fortunately, a few years ago developers Hampton Catlin and Nathan Weizenbaum created a new style sheet syntax with features to help make our increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage—and then used a preprocessor to translate the new smart syntax into the old, dumb CSS that browsers understand.
Learn how Sass (“syntactically awesome style sheets”) can help simplify the creation, updating, and maintenance of powerful sites and apps.
A List Apart: Articles: Getting Started with Sass.
Illustration: Kevin Cornell
