Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsiarto | Hacker News Reader

I guess the mixins and nesting are nice, but who the hell wants to compile their CSS before it goes live. Good font end devs know how to organize their own stylesheets and reduce duplication. Some things don't need the engineering/CS treatment. Some times it's ok to have to declare #fff more than once...

View on HN

When using a preprocessor you don't have to minify your source for production. You can compile it minified with all @import rules processed. Some preprocessors contain helpers for CSS spriting, some let you directly inline the image in a data-uri.

A good tool like SASS/Less is not something to sneeze at without researching fully.

No, I don't mean minify--I mean the SASS has to be run through a preprocessor before you have usable CSS. If I write the CSS, I instantly have usable CSS. I like using minimal tools for web design--browser and text editor. I don't want things I have to compile before I can see them in the browser.

I also think the mixins and nesting are overstated in terms of increasing the efficiency of designing sites with CSS. I am not typically declaring colors 20 times, or doing nesting so deep that it becomes confusing.

The benefits don't outweigh downsides of dealing with SASS files and preprocessors.

>I guess the mixins and nesting are nice, but who the hell wants to compile their CSS before it goes live.

Everybody. We no longer FTP the CSS into the production server like it's 1998. We also minify (a pre-processing step) and concatenate (a pre-processing step). LESS/SASS is just another preprocessing step.

>Some times it's ok to have to declare #fff more than once...

Yes, if you are working on some small / toy site. Being able to have logical names for colors and change them all at once is very valuable for anything larger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com