What is Sass?
If you are new to designing, you must have heard this term a lot of times. Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheet) is a CSS preprocessor that allows you to add special features like nesting, variables, and a lot more. But, before jumping on to these features, let us start with preprocessing, in order to make your experience smooth while using Sass.
Preprocessing
Sassy Cascading Style Sheets abbreviated as SCSS is the improvised superset of CSS. SCSS is a more advanced version, which offers so many features to the developers. It was designed by Hampton Catlin and was developed by Chris Eppstein and Natalie Weizenbaum. SCSS helps you in adding amazing functionalities to CSS like nesting, variables, and a lot more.Talking about the SCSS, it can be separated by a semicolon and it runs in the same line. SCSS brings a lot more to the table which includes better workflows that help in maintaining the stylesheets with ease.
Let us have a look at some examples of Sass-
Sass Variables :
The best thing about Sass is its features. Starting from the Variable, you can say it is one of the efficient features, since, it allows you to store colors, font stack, or any other CSS value that you think can be used throughout the stylesheet.
Sass uses the ‘$’ symbol to turn something into a variable. Here’s an example for you
Sass Nesting :
While using HTML, you must have seen that it is in a clearly nested way and has a proper visual hierarchy. But in the case of CSS, it is not the same. While working on Sass, it will facilitate you to nest the CSS selector that follows the similar visual hierarchy of your HTML.
Be careful while using the nesting feature because if overly nested, it may cause a lot of complexities and will be very hard to maintain.
Sass lets you nest CSS selectors in the same way as HTML.
Sass import :
CSS has @import directive, and similarly, Sass has the same. The @import directive helps you to add the content of any file into another. The CSS’s import option gives you the flexibility to split your CSS into smaller and maintainable portions so that you can make your working process more simple. The only exception here is that every time you use @import, it will create another HTTP request.
Sass Mixins :
Sometimes, CSS becomes a bit daunting. To avoid this during Sass, the mixin feature comes at your rescue. It allows the developer to group the CSS declarations that will be reused throughout the site. Mixins help you keep the Sass very DRY. You can also pass in the values to make your feature more flexible.
Here is an example
To create a mixin, you need to start with @mixin and add the directive name. Once you create the mixin, you can then use it throughout the website by just using @include followed by the name of mixin.
Sass @extend :
The @extend feature allows classes to share a particular set of properties with each other. When there is complicated CSS with many classes together, the chances of duplication are high. The @extend feature will make your code less and facilitate you rewrite the code repeatedly.
In our example, we have created @extend for the font_family. This means, anywhere, @extend is used, the font_family will automatically show up.
Advantages of Sass:
- programming construct.
- Scss has fewer codes, which allows you to write CSS quickly.
- Scss comes with the nesting feature so that you can nest the syntax and all the other useful functions like color manipulation, math functions, and any other values.
- The best thing about Sass is that it is compatible with all the available versions of CSS, so you can use any of its libraries.
- It has variables that can be reused throughout the CSS multiple times.
Conclusion-
Sass is one of the best ways to create a perfect platform that is full of features. Sass is a syntax-friendly platform, that will easily read your code and deliver you the desired outputs with ease. Start using Sass today, and develop an efficient website design for your clients.
