Introduction to Sass

CSS on its own can be fun, but stylesheets are getting larger, more complex, and harder to maintain. This is where a preprocessor can help. Sass lets you use features that don’t exist in CSS yet like variables, nesting, mixins, inheritance and other nifty goodies that make writing CSS fun again.

Preprocessing

The most direct way to make this happen is in your terminal. Once Sass is installed, you can run sass input.scss output.css from your terminal.

Variables

$font-stack:    Helvetica, sans-serif;
$primary-color: #333;

body {
  font: 100% $font-stack;
  color: $primary-color;
}

output

body {
  font: 100% Helvetica, sans-serif;
  color: #333;
}

Nesting

nav {
  ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
  }

  li { display: inline-block; }

  a {
    display: block;
    padding: 6px 12px;
    text-decoration: none;
  }
}

output

nav ul {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  list-style: none;
}

nav li {
  display: inline-block;
}

nav a {
  display: block;
  padding: 6px 12px;
  text-decoration: none;
}

Partials

This is a great way to modularize your CSS and help keep things easier to maintain. Start name with a leading underscore _partial.scss. This let Sass know that the file is only a partial file that it should not be generated into a CSS file. Sass partials are used with the @import directive

Import

// _reset.scss

html,
body,
ul,
ol {
  margin:  0;
  padding: 0;
}

// base.scss

@import 'reset';

body {
  font: 100% Helvetica, sans-serif;
  background-color: #efefef;
}

output

html, body, ul, ol {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

body {
  font: 100% Helvetica, sans-serif;
  background-color: #efefef;
}

Mixins

@mixin border-radius($radius) {
  -webkit-border-radius: $radius;
     -moz-border-radius: $radius;
      -ms-border-radius: $radius;
          border-radius: $radius;
}

.box { @include border-radius(10px); }

output

.box {
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  -ms-border-radius: 10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
}

Extend

.message {
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  padding: 10px;
  color: #333;
}

.success {
  @extend .message;
  border-color: green;
}

.error {
  @extend .message;
  border-color: red;
}

.warning {
  @extend .message;
  border-color: yellow;
}

output

.message, .success, .error, .warning {
  border: 1px solid #cccccc;
  padding: 10px;
  color: #333;
}

.success {
  border-color: green;
}

.error {
  border-color: red;
}

.warning {
  border-color: yellow;
}

Operators

.container { width: 100%; }


article[role="main"] {
  float: left;
  width: 600px / 960px * 100%;
}

aside[role="complementary"] {
  float: right;
  width: 300px / 960px * 100%;
}

output

.container {
  width: 100%;
}

article[role="main"] {
  float: left;
  width: 62.5%;
}

aside[role="complementary"] {
  float: right;
  width: 31.25%;
}

Functions

Read more here

Written on July 13, 2017