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Comment by chriseppstein | Hacker News Reader

This plugin is such a great example of how to use compass and sass to build simple abstractions out of some of the most complex css that exists.

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A few CSS3 rules on a single element isn't something I would call "the most complex css that exists".

EDIT: I do like compass and this plugin.

It's CSS3 that degrades beautifully in IE and controlled by 2-3 lines of styling. What more do you want?

I think his point was simply that writing such CSS is hardly complicated. I like this abstraction and think it will be pretty handy for Compass users (of which I plan to become one), but this mixin basically reduces ~8 lines of CSS to two.

If I had been less snarky I might have communicated my question better, which is, what's the CSS pattern that's more complicated? It'd be a good candidate for a Compass plugin.

As far as amount of css goes, here's what you're dealing with to achieve something similar in only CSS.

  1. Button reset - to get browsers to the same starting point
  2. Rounded corners, Text shadows, and Gradients + vendoring
  3. Background image fallback
  4. Padding, Text size, line-height, etc
  5. Default, Hover, and Active states for all styles

That's a lot of css to write, effectively reduced to a single mixin. Of course, it's also great that you can use the bare minimum html.

And there's a ton of color math going on.

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