Comments on: Sass-y Dynamic CSS

By: deadlyicon

deadlyicon — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:47:07 +0000

SASSY! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUihru5iO3Q

By: Hampton

Hampton — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:21:36 +0000

@Gavin: In my world… 2 spaces is the ONLY acceptable answer to indentation. Tabs throw an error if they exist at all. Odd numbers of spaces throw an error.

By: Tim Cooijmans

Tim Cooijmans — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:11:43 +0000

@Jerome: The danger is, of course, in mixing tabs and spaces: you can’t normally see the difference. If one tab counts as one level of indentation, as what does one space count? If eight spaces count as one level of indentation, what if I have set my editor’s tab width to 4? If a line begins with two or three spaces followed by a tab, does it count as one level of indentation?

I feel like I’m stating the obvious, and these problems have probably been more or less solved for Python, but I’m not very comfortable with such syntax. Love the way it looks, though.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:32:15 +0000

Neat, I really like the way the CSS syntax is constructed.

On the topic, I just recently came across another solution for dynamic CSS that is simple to create and easy to use. It uses embedded Ruby in a .rcss file.

http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2006/03/23/dirt-simple-rcss-templates

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:38:20 +0000

@Nik: Thanks for the reply. No question that visual clues, like indenting, can help understanding of code immensely, so I guess why not take it one step further and parse indents to determine logical structure…

I think the idea of CSS variables and nesting is a great, not to say an essential addition, and I’m sure if I could just take off my comfortable XHTML wellingtons for a while I’d realise that the water’s lovely :)

By: Nik Chankov

Nik Chankov — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:43:02 +0000

@Nik: I agree – I mixed the technologies ;) I agree vars are quite good idea.

By: Kae Verens

Kae Verens — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:21:22 +0000

thanks Andrew – it’s a small script. I’ll post the entire script into the blog post itself

By: Andrew Collins

Andrew Collins — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:36:25 +0000

@Kae Verens: The txt-version of your PHP script just runs the PHP script. I’d like to try out your code, but when I posted a comment to your blog it rejected the comment. :(

By: Kae Verens

Kae Verens — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:15:43 +0000

Nice trick! Based on that, I whipped up an example of how to do it with PHP on-the-fly. http://verens.com/archives/2007/10/01/variables-in-css/

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:11:39 +0000

Looks like a nice technology for Ruby users. I don’t really understand the removal of the ;{} symbols since it is almost the exact same code, I’d hope that it supports standard CSS syntax as well (which it might, I didn’t look too closely).

By: Nik

Nik — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:21:20 +0000

@Jermone No flames here. I don’t think whitespace is nearly as bad as people assume. I wrote Haml and Sass (both whitespace significant) and I hadn’t ever used a language like that before (no python)… mostly Java and PHP and Ruby. I find that once people stop being reactionary about whitespace and allow their brains to parse the information… it becomes rather simple to read. Its all about letting go though and being open to new things and new ways of thinking.

@Nik: First off, you DEFINITELY don’t need any Javascript. Sass is compiled into a regular CSS *file* on the server during application booting. The client sees no difference in the CSS. Secondly, I don’t believe Sass is a completely new syntax for CSS. It is based on CSS… just with built-in scoping, less required characters (;{}), and a movement of the : (even though you can put the : where you are used to… “width: 70px” works), and constants. Sass is built on CSS both in browser terms and in generation and implementation.

By: Nik Chankov

Nik Chankov — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:13:35 +0000

variables in CSS is quite good thing, but using this library you need to learn new syntax and probably most of the editors doesn’t suport it.

in top of that you have to use another JS lib. It’s the same as ORM – why you shuld learn complete new syntax when there is SQL which is quite descriptive.

By: michele

michele — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:01:14 +0000

If you need something quite similar but python based go check out CleverCSS:

http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:30:07 +0000

OK, so I’m a bit of an MOR programmer who hasn’t yet experienced the delights of Ruby, but doesn’t Haml and it’s offspring just look nasty with its significant symbols and meaningful whitespace?

!blindfold= put_on
!wait#for= flames

By: Jack Gleeson

Jack Gleeson — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:33:49 +0000

This looks really cool