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

reset.css versus normalize.css


This has been a topic of debate for a long time now. Some popular frameworks and libraries favor reset.css, like Compass does, while others favor normalize.css, such as Twitter Bootstrap, ZURB Foundation, and HTML5 Boilerplate. I myself prefer normalize.css. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, Compass – Navigating with Compass, I simply find reset.css to be overly aggressive and (perhaps) lazy in its approach. However, normalize.css is not perfect either. Let me start by explaining the differences.

reset.css

reset.css was created by Eric Meyer in 2008. It removes all browser styles across the board. All margins, padding, and borders are set to 0. Font-sizes are set to 100% and line-heights are set to 1. Blockquote, pre, code, KBD, and table styles are also removed. This means everything looks exactly the same. Everything just looks like normal 16px text. From headings to sub, sup, blockquotes, and anything else are all the same size and you are expected to re-style...