Hacker News Reader

Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

> To me this just shows his lack of experience working with a big project where using things like variables and scoping things helps a lot.

Honestly depends on how you structure the HTML and CSS. I've worked on some very, very large projects stretching across 15 subcontractors and we did not use css preprocessors. It wasn't even an issue really.

CSS is really great at cascading properly. Most of the times I've seen where people want to use variables could have been just as easily accomplished via inheriting from a top level style.

But I'm not going to sit here and tell you you're an idiot for using CSS preprocessors. They serve a purpose. They work. Yes they complicate things further but if it helps you deliver faster I'm not going to complain...much :)

View on HN

The general approach without using mixins is creating visual classes, which now means the look of say .login-box is determined in two places : the HTML where .login-box has visual classes added and the CSS for .login-box and whatever the visual classes are.

I'm hard pressed to believe the quality of the CSS across 15 subcontractors was actually good and consistent. You can't get 5 developers in a room without finding at least a few differences in opinion how something could or should be done and when it comes to CSS you have even more flexibility to how you're writing it and the associated markup.

What was done to ensure similarity of HTML/CSS across such a large project?

> I'm hard pressed to believe the quality of the CSS across 15 subcontractors was actually good and consistent. You can't get 5 developers in a room without finding at least a few differences in opinion how something could or should be done and when it comes to CSS you have even more flexibility to how you're writing it and the associated markup.

Quality across more than 1 subcontractor for ANYTHING is rarely good. But the most important thing when dealing with large projects divided with multiple groups? Ownership. You make one group own the design / CSS. Then when others change their CSS it runs through them for reviews but they also supply guidelines for being consistent, etc.

It's almost impossible to handle disparate groups without having centralized owners and people who create guidelines on how to do everything so it's consistent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com