“Which CSS preprocessor language should I choose?” is a hot topic lately. I’ve been asked in person several times and an online debate has been popping up every few days it seems. It’s nice that the conversation has largely turned from whether or not preprocessing is a good idea to which one language is best. Let’s do this thing.
Really short answer: SASS
Slightly longer answer: SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that’s cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing.
Chris Coyier finds an answer to what preprocessor is the better one by pointing out what the advantages of each preprocessor are. And as it turns out SASS is winning the race because it has more power and better features. So if you are asked why you use SASS, you might want to link people to this post.
After Harry Roberts published his HTML/CSS coding style I’ve decided to follow his call and write down how I like to code and what my guidelines for HTML and CSS coding are. This article is only a way to describe what I like to do – but it is by far not a recommendation or something. I have not really tried to “canalize” the coding style I do before but it is about time to do so and to write it down. Please let me know if you think that there are ways to do certain things better or in
Developed at Twitter to support our internal styleguide, RECESS is a simple, attractive code quality tool for CSS built on top of LESS.
Incorporate it into your development process as a linter, or integrate it directly into your build system as a compiler, RECESS will keep your source looking clean and super managable.
As I think reading the source is essential for developers to become good at what they do viewing this source in readable style is essential too. RECESS is a tool which helps you developing good-looking CSS with LESS. It is developed at Twitter and has now been open-sourced.
RECESS is a Node.js module and is maintained by @fat. You can find out more about it by viewing the source at GitHub.
BTW: I’ve decided to not minimize and concatenate my blog’s source anymore. So, feel free to dig deep!
Please read about the updated syntax of CSS variables in the first update of this post. Since a little bit more than a month (as of the time of writing) there is a Editor’s Draft for a CSS Variables Module by Google (Tab Atkins and Luke Macpherson) and Daniel Glazman. Just a few days ago the Working Draft was updated. The first draft was written in 2008 by Daniel Glazman but was not added to the official specification. The new WD extends this proposal by Glazman. Disclaimer: This article is part of a small series about the latest CSS working
Since the beginning of February there were some proposals for the CSS3 specification. These proposals are not yet part of the specification and will likely be changed until they get adopted by the CSSWG. One of these drafts is the CSS Hierarchies Module Level 3. So what’s the Hierarchies Module? And why “Level 3″? The Hierarchies Module is not exactly new. It exists since the very first steps of CSS and was first released in Dezember 1996 with CSS1. The CSS1 specification is still up, so check it out if you want to. When you write CSS you always use selectors to target
I think all of you know Lea Verou’s dabblet. dabblet is an interactive playground for quickly testing snippets of CSS and HTML code. It uses -prefix-free, so that you won’t have to add any prefixes in your CSS code. You can save your work in Github gists, embed it in other websites and share it with others. ~ About dabblet Some time ago I made this tiny Google Chrome App for jsFiddle which is in case just a bookmarklet with a bigger icon. I did this for dabblet, too but extended the app to something more: It displays all your dabblets
At /gebrüderheitz we use Git as a version control system as we think this is the best to work together on a level which is easy to learn and work with. Before we used Git we’ve used SVN but this is by far not as flexible as Git. There are enough posts gathering the difference between Git and SVN so I will not cover any of these. When working in a team it’s important to keep your different stages of development in sync and control somehow: There is a front-end development going on which is in deep connection with the
Some weeks ago I made a pull request for HTML5Boilerplate which should update jQuery to the latest version available on the Google CDN. How ever I copied the old version of minified jQuery because the uncompressed version was available but the minified wasn’t. Stupid thing! That’s why I created Is Mothereffin’ jQuery up? The service checks three major CDNs for the availability of the latest jQuery version. View Is Mothereffin’ jQuery up? How to Check if the File is up I had some difficulties to find the right method how to detect if a file is already available with JavaScript.
There is a big discussion going on at the moment covering the actual point of how to deal with images and media et al. on mobile-phones and other devices as there are some things that don’t work as on a desktop computer: Bandwidth Screen size Performance / Velocity The question is how to deliver responsive images on a mobile website. You maybe use something like img { max-width: 100%; height: auto; } in your responsive design to prevent images from being bigger then the screen of a mobile device. In most of the cases this shrinks images in its displayed
Somehow… <time> Disappeared As you might have heard the <time>-element was removed from the HTML5 specification last saturday by Ian “Hixie” Hickson, the editor of the spec. Hixie decided to remove <time> and replace it by the more general <data>-element. A question that came up: Why got<time> removed and why did nobody stop Hixie? Well: There was a discussion on the bug-tracker about replacing <time> with <data>. But nothing about it on the mailing-list and stuff… and Hixie decided to drop <time> and replace it by the power he has as the editor. Not only <time> was removed from the specification but
