Sass - Overview

What is SASS?

SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheet) is a CSS pre-processor, which helps to reduce repetition with CSS and saves time. It is more stable and powerful CSS extension language that describes the style of a document cleanly and structurally.

It was initially designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Natalie Weizenbaum in 2006. Later, Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein used its initial version to extend the Sass with SassScript.

Why to Use SASS?

• It is a pre-processing language which provides indented syntax (its own syntax) for CSS.

• It provides some features, which are used for creating stylesheets that allows writing code more efficiently and is easy to maintain.

• It is a super set of CSS, which means it contains all the features of CSS and is an open source pre-processor, coded in Ruby.

• It provides the document style in a good, structured format than flat CSS. It uses re-usable methods, logic statements and some of the built-in functions such as color manipulation, mathematics and parameter lists.

Features of SASS

• It is more stable, powerful, and compatible with versions of CSS.

• It is a super set of CSS and is based on JavaScript.

• It is known as syntactic sugar for CSS, which means it makes easier way for user to read or express the things more clearly.

• It uses its own syntax and compiles to readable CSS.

• You can easily write CSS in less code within less time.

• It is an open source pre-processor, which is interpreted into CSS.

Advantages of SASS

• It allows writing clean CSS in a programming construct.

• It helps in writing CSS quickly.

• It is a superset of CSS, which helps designers and developers work more efficiently and quickly.

• As Sass is compatible with all versions of CSS, we can use any available CSS libraries.

• It is possible to use nested syntax and useful functions such as color manipulation, mathematics and other values.

Disadvantages of SASS

• It takes time for a developer to learn new features present in this pre-processor.

• If many people are working on the same site, then should use the same preprocessor. Some people use Sass and some people use CSS to edit the files directly. Therefore, it becomes difficult to work on the site.

• There are chances of losing benefits of browser's built-in element inspector.