Book Image

Mastering Sass

By : Luke Watts
Book Image

Mastering Sass

By: Luke Watts

Overview of this book

CSS and Sass add elegance and excellence to the basic language, and consist of a CSS-compatible syntax that allows you to use variables, nested rules, mixins, inline imports, and much more. This book will start with an overview of the features in Sass and Compass, most of which you'll already be familiar; however, this will ensure you know what’s expected as the book goes deeper into Sass and Compass. Next you will learn CSS and HTML concepts that are vital to a good Sass workflow. After all, Sass exists to simplify writing CSS, but it won’t teach you how to make clean, scalable, reusable CSS. For that, you need to understand some basic concepts of OOCSS, SMACCS, and Atomic Design. Once you’ve brushed up on the important concepts, it’s time to write some Sass. Mainly you’ll write a few functions and mixins that really leverage control flow using @if / @else loops and you’ll learn how to figure out when and why things are going wrong before they bring you to a stop. Moving further, you’ll learn how to use @debug, @warn and @error to properly handle errors. You’ll also learn about Gulp and how to use it to automate your workflow and reduce your repetitive tasks. And finally you’ll learn about sourcemaps. With sourcemaps, you’ll be able to write, debug, and view your Sass and Compass all from within the browser. It’ll even LiveReload too! As a bonus, you’ll take a look at that funky Flexbox, currently all the rage! You’ll learn how powerful and flexible it really is, and how you can use it with Compass. Best of all, it falls back very gracefully indeed! In fact, you’ll be able to apply it to any existing project without having to change a line of the original CSS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Sass
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 3. Compass – Navigating with Compass

In the previous chapter, we saw how using Sass can solve problems that would have been almost impossible with plain CSS. Possible or not, it would certainly have been unfeasible to attempt what we covered in the last chapter with vanilla CSS. In this chapter we'll look at one of the most well-known frameworks built with Sass, known simply as Compass.

Compass was created at a time when HTML5/CSS3 was still in its early stages of adoption, not only by the major browsers, but also by web designers and developers. This is commonly called the experimental implementation phase. This is where we get vendor prefixes from.

When I first began using Compass, it was mainly for its ability to automatically compile all of the necessary vendor prefixes and even those painfully verbose filters (also known as polyfills) in certain CSS3 properties. To me it was just a mixin library which made setting up and maintaining Sass projects much easier. I tried the Blueprint...