The Problem
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) are a great way to separate the style of your web documents from the structure (the HTML). In my experience, however, managing CSS has proven to be time consuming, inflexible and cumbersome at best.
Current Problems with CSS
- Repetition is almost unavoidable
- Managing stylesheets is cumbersome
- Crafting css is slow (brackets and semi-colons, barf)
- Production vs Development copies of CSS is hard to manage
A Solution - Compass
- CSS Generation Framework
-
built with
Ruby
and
SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets)
- part of HAML (HTML Abstraction Markup Language)
- SASS can be used without compass
- Compass adds live compilation, pattern stamping, plugins, project configuration to the SASS basics
How does Compass Help?
- multiple inputs, single output file compilation
- on the fly compilation and monitoring
- faster than coding with CSS
- simpler, cleaner, more elegant than CSS
-
abstractions
- variables, mixins, DRY, nesting
- common browser issues abstracted away (clearfix, horizontal-list float ie6)
- framework support (blueprint, 960gs, yui, etc..)