Are you using LESS, SASS or something else to manage your CSS?

If you don't want to use a preprocessor you don't have too, but its not fair to completely discredit it because YOU don't like the extended feature set it offers.

As for the variables, the great thing about variables is you can name and use them for whatever you want! Are you really going to tell me you can't think of a single use case where having variables in CSS would be good? Well a lot of other people can, and as a result we now have native CSS variables!

I disagree on the nesting, I think it's way more legible. If things get to deep you can always break it up however you want. It has nothing to do with saving bytes, its going to compile to the same code. The point is legibility and maintainability.

I disagree, I much rather open header.scss then sift through a 900+ line style.css.

So @deathshadow if scss was natively supported in the browser you wouldn't find a single feature useful? https://sass-lang.com/guide

 

Unless, like so many people and companies, you run IE. So, not ready for prime time.

When your style sheet is well structured, i.e. contextual, it is legible. My primary concern is and has been debugging and maintenance. I am often forced to work without access to the pre-compiled source. Yeah, it sucks even when I do have the source. Structural organization? What's that? So often, any more, the folks who hire me to fix things don't know what they're doing and depend on those pre-processors and platforms. That includes soi-disant web designers/developers. Back when IE was a certified PoS, it was understandable; work-arounds and outright ugly hacks kept beans on my table with an occasional steak.

A well structured style sheet does not require more than locating the right context. A search and replace on a region is trivial.

gary

 

Not a one... excepting perhaps "operators" which I no longer 'need' or want with box-sizing:border-box; removing the ONLY situation I ever really needed them. By giving us the 'broken' IE box model that actually makes more sense. Joe forbid a declared width be the ACTUAL width of the element.

"variables" -- only really results in either needing more edits, being redundant to grouping selectors, or being too lazy or ignorant to know how to ^H

"nesting" -- results in unclear hard to follow syntax that ALSO makes it many times harder to diagnose with a document inspector.

"partials" -- again, ^C^V is your friend.

"import" -- if you have enough CSS to be using @import in the first place, there's something horribly wrong and mismanaged with your CSS. Folding them in at a precompile stage doesn't fix that. ALSO makes it harder to maintain by breaking stuff up across multiple files making it HARDER to just find something and edit it. ^F / F3 are your friends.

"mixins" -- gah, just make you go hunting for things, end up editing more if you change your mind for things not to match, and when they would serve a purpose just group your bloody selectors!!!

"extend" -- GROUP YOUR BLOODY DAMNED SELECTORS!!! Nothing like replicating existing functionality.

"Operators" -- exists as "calc", 99.99% of layouts have zero reason to ever need this now that box-sizing:border-box is functional on everything from IE8/newer.

The whole 'imports" and "breaking it into smaller files" also a laugh since it results in REDUNDANT CSS and makes it HARDER to do what mixins, variables, and extends are supposed to do. Great when the whole thing is even internally self-defeating!

So no, I don't see ANYTHING of value offered, and would think that any project that would see benefit from it is one that is utterly and completely mismanaged, improperly developed, and just filled with ineptly coded bloated junk.

That opinion being based on the projects of the past five to six years I've been contracted on as an accessibility consultant where such asshattery had to be ripped out by the nerts and recoded from scratch.

Ranks right up there with mental midgetry like CSR, base64 encoding images like it's still 1977, and building entire layouts out of nothing but DIV and endless classes without a single semantic tag in sight, telling large swaths of users to go f*** themselves. Kind of like that train wreck of a site in your signature that opens to a giant blank page here scripting blocked, and when shields are dropped wastes 317k of markup and 111k of CSS on a SITE that really has no legitimate reason to even be more than 8k of markup for the home page and 20k of CSS FOR THE ENTIRE SITE even with the goofy animated crap that shouldn't impress anyone over the age of five.

 

I remember when someone asked a similar question a while ago. Comparing the aswers they'd got from memory, I can conclude that @deathshadow hasn't mellowed down one bit.