

SMACSS and SASS – The future of stylesheets - tmschndr
http://blog.railslove.com/2012/03/28/smacss-and-sass-the-future-of-stylesheets/

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moe
Sass/Compass/SCSS, Less, Stylus...

Can you please decide for _one_ and build a _stable_ toolchain around it?
Having less half-baked support for 6 variants of the same thing doesn't help
anything. Kthxbai.

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twog
I hear what you're saying, but isnt that "problem" what open source is all
about?

I personally prefer Less, but that doesnt mean there shouldnt be multiple
options. Everyone has different things that work for them.

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batista
_> I hear what you're saying, but isn't that "problem" what open source is all
about?_

It's an artifact of Open Source, but it doesn't mean it's what "open source is
all about". It would still be Open Source even if there was only one best-of-
breed project with an open source license, instead of several fragmented
options.

If people were unhappy with that, they could then fork that ONE project to
their taste --or start others but in a much smaller scale.

Like, say, Linux: it's still Open Source, but gets 99% of the love, user base,
and community and enterprise support that other open OSs get. So you have some
alternatives (FreeBSD, etc) but not the more dire effects of mass
fragmentation.

It's not like, say, LESS vs SASS are THAT different to warrant two different
projects, anyway.

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benohear
These are all improvements, I'm sure, but I'm less convinced they help address
the problem I've most often confronted with on large projects, which is
roughly this: You need to make a change to a specific item because it looks
crap on a specific screen. Do you:

a) Special case it, thus adding to the bloat and making it tougher to use
elsewhere.

b) Change the general case, but then need to spend a lot of time going through
the app to make sure this hasn't blown up elsewhere.

c) Create a new general case, which adds bloat and might never be reused.

Compounding the problem is that often the CSS is third party. For example you
find yourself overriding this or that Jquery component, but then it turns out
that the style you overrode is actually used in a completely different
component.

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snookca
Read through smacss.com, if you haven't already. It advocates a modular
approach that should minimize the impact that components have on other
components, thus a style change to one component won't blow up the rest of the
site.

Third party tools can be hit and miss. Hopefully you're working with
plugins/libraries that don't inject inline code and rely on namespaced classes
to achieve the result you need. Then, you have control of the CSS to style as
you wish.

(disclaimer: I wrote smacss (but didn't write the blog post))

