

Screencast: A CSS Framework that is actually a framework. - chriseppstein
http://vimeo.com/4335944

======
zain
Hour long video behind the submitted link. Some bite-sized info about Compass
for those who don't want to watch the whole thing:

With Compass, you write your styles in Sass which is compiled to CSS. This
helps with code reuse and general cleanliness, not unlike the tool demo'd in
the Reddit keynote at PyCon.

You can use Compass to create CSS styles on top of a framework like BluePrint
or YUI, which is why Compass calls itself a meta-framework.

Website: <http://compass-style.org/>

More Info: <http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass>

------
jpcx01
Great link. If you haven't checked this out, do so. I've been using SASS for
about 2 years and Compass for about 6 months now and its completely changed
that way I do CSS development.

Chris Eppstein is doing amazing work. I think it'll revolutionize how web
stylesheets are built.

~~~
csbartus
for me haml/sass is a change like jquery was for html/js

now i have a superclean html structure with haml, the same superclean css
structure with sass.

compass adds grid & other useful mixins and run-time automatic compilation of
sass and haml files.

in plus everything is dry, my own set of mixins reusable in every web app are
growing fast.

with compass growing up i think we'll have an API-like building tool for web
frontends.

------
luigi
I used Compass + 960.gs on a recent project. It took me a while to understand,
but once I got it, I really saw the value. Simply put, it makes producing good
looking websites easier. I particularly like the helpers provided in the
Utilities Module:

[http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/compass-core-
ut...](http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/compass-core-utilities-
module)

I actually find Sass more useful than Haml. I find Haml gets in my way too
much, and I'd rather do things in ERB.

~~~
sant0sk1
I love HAML most of the time but my major beef with it is that it won't allow
midline Ruby injection like ERB. This gets really lame, for instance if you
have a <p> and you want to use multiple link_to()s inside it.

SASS + Compass, on the other hand, has been a boon to my productivity.

~~~
chriseppstein
haml 2.2 has universal interpolation and when you put that together with say a
markdown filter, writing your paragraphs of text in haml should be a breeze.

------
CGamesPlay
Hour long video explains what I could have picked up in 10 minutes of reading.

SASS looks like it could have been so much more. Its syntax differs from CSS
in ways that it doesn't need to (specifically, requiring newlines and
prohibiting multiple rules or selectors on a single line), and the lack of
local variable also decreases one's mobility with the tool.

It's a good start, but it could have been so much better.

~~~
chriseppstein
When there's something better, I'll gladly use that.

Until then, I think it's sad that you've chosen to focus on the "negatives"
that are largely style instead of the positives that are the substance of the
screencast.

For what it's worth, in about a day or so of hacking on the sass source code,
one could change it to be white-space inactive and to just rely on css tokens.
If someone cared enough, they could add that feature. But, it turns out no one
has, because it takes all of 15 minutes to get used to it.

------
Dancrew32
I see the advantages to having CSS variables and all, but can anyone tell me
why this (Sass/Compass) would be any better than me defining variables (like
grid widths/colors/etc..) in something like PHP, running it through a CSS
document and outputting that document as a CSS file?

~~~
chriseppstein
I tried. If my screencast didn't convey that information, I failed. Did you
watch it?

------
bobzimuta
Coincidentally I'm watching Reddit's keynote from PyCon and they wrote their
own CSS compiler called C55. Their keynote is at
<http://blip.tv/file/1951296/> and the slides at (starting with slide 29)
[http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/ride-the-snake-reddit-
key...](http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/ride-the-snake-reddit-keynote-
pycon-09?type=powerpoint)

The thing I like most about what they've done is to embed the functionality
into CSS, rather than writing a new meta-language.

~~~
chriseppstein
Good ideas keep getting re-invented. There's about 4 or 5 versions of this
with slightly different syntax, etc. But Sass alone has scripting, mixins, and
libraries. These are the language features that make compass possible.

From the feature set I see there, that is where Sass was about 1 to 1.5 years
ago.

------
dustineichler
pretty interesting. blueprint and sass is a worthwhile combination i wouldn't
fight. otherwise, i'd hesitate to use one or another as a standalone tool.
haml(unrelated here) is the exception.

