The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Sass | Hacker News Reader

The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Sass

blog.teamtreehouse.com

50 pointsachalkley16 comments

Am I the only one that would rather there be one syntax? Sass and Scss is probably confusing for "Absolute Beginners". My vote would be for Scss because you can start with regular old css and sprinkle in the awesome Scss features as you need them and learn.

I disagree that there needs to be one syntax because Sass comes with the tools to convert between these freely. I would prefer people release code in SCSS though. There's a lot to be said for having it be a superset and maintain familiarity of code structure. Anyone starting out should almost certainly not use the legacy Sass syntax.

I was disappointed that the article didn't recommend using SCSS over SASS.

Why should it? SCSS is already the default syntax, and all the Sass documentation is written in SCSS.

Think of Sass Indented Syntax as a power tool for advanced users. (Although I usually use indented, there are times where I prefer SCSS instead)

Why would it recommend one over the other if it's something that's most definitely a user preference? I wish we had stayed with the first syntax as it's "cleaner" in my opinion, but at the end of the day that's exactly what it is: my opinion.

Bah. I read SaaS and thought the CSS image was a joke at first.

I haven't used Sass yet but it seems pretty cool. Does anyone know how it compares to Less?

Chris Coyier wrote a nice article detailing some of the details http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/

The single biggest difference is in available style libraries in my opinion. I could probably never use Less because my workflow has become so heavily intertwined with Bourbon, Susy, and Compass.

This article is sweet! Sass is definitely looking more and more appealing.

Thanks for sharing!

It's basically the same, minus a few differences in syntax.

ie. Mixins

LESS

    .border-radius(@radius){ border-radius: @radius; }
    .border-radius(5px);

SCSS/SASS

    @mixin border-radius(@radius){ border-radius: @radius; }
    @include border-radius(5px);

- - -

The biggest difference is being able remove curly braces and semi-colons, which can speed up your development

    h1
      font-weight: bold
      color: red

Ignoring Sass @extend is ignoring perhaps its most powerful feature:

http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#ex...

Ah, very nice. Will definitely have play around with it.

Thank you!!!

I prefer Stylus.

May I ask why? I had used Sass for along time (with Compass) and decided to try Stylus for a pretty big project, and for some unforeseeable reason I ended up with less maintainable post compile css. I really don't understand how I ended up with a mess if they're so alike to be honest and since I've been doing web development for quite some time. It may have been more fault of the project and it's inherent structure, goals, and deadlines, but I would reckon that it wouldn't have been as bad had I done it in Sass.

Working on a Coffeescript project together with node, I figured stylus would be an awesome addition, for an js-only stack. Began out all nice and fine, one thing bugging me was that syntax highlighting was horrible in ST (if you know of a better package please let me know). As the project grew I encountered very annoying implementations when using the arguments keyword in mixins (box-shadow I am looking at you) and I ended up adding nasty if constructs inside my mixins. Stlus was getting annoying over time, at first I thought it to be the liberal kid on the block — who needs braces/colons anymore? But it turns out the highlighting could not figure out what was going on, and me neither. As the project grew, I started missing my braces.

Compared to sass/less, sometimes I needed to build before I knew if something worked the way I expected, in addition visual clues are non existent and comments were needed to identify structure.

So in response to this comments, stylus is quite nice, but it needs some rules, especially for bigger projects, because it does get messy. And last thing, I wish it was more like Coffeescript, at least use # for comments stylus and you make my day.

If you're a JS person, Stylus is pretty great.

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