“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
Christian “Schepp” Schaefer shows how to use the new filter-properties for CSS3 and combine them with methods implemented by most modern browsers. This article was first published in German on December 19th 2011.
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
Lea Verou publishes some really great stuff. Her latest work is Animatable. A tool to showcase the variety of things you can do with CSS3 animations. And it’s awesome. Some weeks ago I had this article about rotating images like I use in the footer of this page. There is an animation in Lea’s demos that makes use of the same properties. You will find some nice cutting edge CSS3-techniques in the demos so make sure to check out the source-code on GitHub. You can also contribute and check in a pull request if you want to. Edit: And by
The CSS3-spec is full of wonderful things. Sometimes things that are not so desperately needed as others but anyway… good to have them. One of these more or less needed properties might be resize. It is part of the CSS3 Basic User Interface Module. What is really useful with resize is the ability to restrict the resizing of textarea for example. But it is possible to resize every element you’d like to as this demo by Simurai shows. There are four values for resize that are kinda logical: none: no resizing at all horizontal: resizing only horizontal vertical: resizing only…