

Why I'm Still Against SASS and LESS - huslage
http://www.amberweinberg.com/why-im-still-against-sass-less

======
trebor
I too come from a background of "before CSS" and hand-coding HTML. But I
differ completely as to why we should use SASS/Less.

So addressing her misgivings in order:

1\. Code bloat happens—whether hand-crafted or automatic bloat. A good
designer will always fight bloat, and a preprocessor helps reduce bloat.
Mixins can introduce bloat, and decrease bloat.

2\. Clients should never edit the CSS. We've had folks claim that if we'd come
up with the design, or even the template, and they'd use it. More often than
not, they can't. They just don't know how to do it. The designs they want are
just to complicated for them to edit the CSS to them.

3\. Preprocessors do not introduce logic into the CSS, they introduce logic in
how the CSS is created. By and large a normal site does not need _any_
if/else/for-loop logic to the stylesheet.

The problems that inspired jQuery, SASS, Less are all based upon inconsistent
implementations. If the browsers would all just play along and implement all
the standards we'd just be okay, right? But obviously you need compatibility
layers to handle all the inconsistencies... and so you get frameworks,
preprocessors, etc.

~~~
WalterSear
Web pages are getting more complicated.

The tone of the article made it seem that the author is resistant to this
added complexity, and is blaming the tools that have been developed for
managing it.

------
jsiarto
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...

~~~
trebor
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.

~~~
jsiarto
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.

