Styling applications made easy with Sass

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is widely popular because of the simplicity it offers while presenting web applications. It comprises of style sheets which are long lists that have rules to describe how your web page should look like. If you’re into web designing then you must have heard the term ‘Sass’. It is very important for any developer working on web apps to understand exactly what Sass is and how it works?

Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets and is a preprocessor that allows you to use features that are not a part of the extensive CSS standard. It is also responsible for adding special features like variables, nested rules, and mixins (occasionally referred to as syntactic sugar) into the regular CSS. The main objective is to make the coding procedure easier and more structured. With Sass, you can write styling requirements in .scss or .sass files, which later will be compiled into a regular CSS file. It is the newly compiled file that will be loaded in the browser to style the web application and will help the browser apply the styles to your web page in the right way. Let me explain this in detail with practical examples. But first, let’s see why should you go for Sass?

Why Sass?

CSS syntax compatibility: Sass uses two different syntaxes that are Sass and SCSS. If you are thinking that you will have to spend hours to start using the SCSS, then let me tell you that the SCSS syntax is fully compatible with CSS. So, whenever you want to create an SCSS file, simply rename the .css file to .scss.

Variables for all your requirements: Consider a scenario where you want to repeat a certain style element like color or font. What will you do? You will copy that code or value and paste it wherever you want throughout the code. No! Thanks to Sass, you can just store these values as variables and repeat them wherever you want just by calling these variables instead of writing the whole code. Use them anywhere, any number of times throughout the Sass file. Also, if you want to change the value just update it in the variables, recompile and done. Now, that is what makes Sass easy and powerful.

Nested syntax: Nested structure is one of the oldest yet one of the powerful structures in coding. It allows you to declare one structure inside another. The basic advantage of nested syntax is it makes it easy to maintain the code with better readability and structure. CSS pre-processors have improved ability with the nested syntax. This ability has provided Sass to perform a broader function. You can target the elements cleanly and you can use the nested structure for HTML elements.

Mixins: There are times when a block of code is repeated in style sheet more than once. So, to save you from all the hassle of writing it all over again, you can use mixins. This may sound like functions in other programming languages so, do not get confused between mixins and functions because Sass also has functions. The basic difference is that the output of mixins is compiled directly into CSS styles, whereas functions return a value that can then become the value for a CSS property. Another advantage of mixins is that if you want to change the value in the block, just change the default mixins value using @include call.

Let’s see how you can install Sass in your application.

How to Install Sass?

The first step of using any scripting language is to set it up for your project. Here are some of the easy ways to install Sass:

• Install Sass using the command line…read more