Stepping away from Sass

Modern CSS in a Nutshell - Cloud Four

I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:

1. Custom properties, flexbox, and grid are game-changers.
2. Pre- and post-processers are becoming less and less necessary.

This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.

Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.

They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.

New principle: Do not design around third-party tools unless it actually breaks the Web · Issue #335 · w3ctag/design-principles

There’s a really interesting discussion here, kicked off by Lea, about balancing long-term standards with short-term pragmatism. Specifically, it’s about naming things.

Naming things is hard. Naming things in standards, doubly so.

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

• use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
• use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
• match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
• stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.

CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019

I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.

Sass Selectors: To Nest Or Not To Nest? | Brad Frost

The fascinating results of Brad’s survey.

Personally, I’m not a fan of nesting. I feel it obfuscates more than helps. And it makes searching for a specific selector tricky.

That said, Danielle feels quite strongly that nesting is the way to go, so on Clearleft projects, that’s how we write Sass + BEM.