Sass in the Real World: book 1 of 4

A little under the hood

Sass: Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets. A stylesheet language initially designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein. Sass clearly is a pioneer in it's field. Despite it's many competitors, Sass continues to pave the way not only for preprocessors, but continues to gain support with the W3C standards group and influential browser manufactures.

One of Sass' many strengths we will explore is it's support of two distinctly different syntaxes. A feature that has lead to confusion amongst newcomers and controversy with the more seasoned developers. Be it the the original Sass .sass syntax or the newer SCSS .scss syntax, they are equally committed to by the Sass core team and have no functional differences. In this chapter we will go into where Sass came from, why the SCSS syntax was created and what the differences really are.

Sass' next learning curve typically falls into structural and architectural disciplines. It is not that developers don't know how to write code, but more to the point of writing well structured, readable, manageable and scalable code. The one who wrote the code is not always the one who maintains the code. Remember the campfire rule, "You must always leave the code as good or in a better state than you found it."