I woke up this morning, bleary eyed, slightly hungover from the first (amaze) day at CSS Dev Conference and really really felt compelled to write this.
I'm a little scared of publishing it. I don't want to be preachy - you do some code, you do it your way, it works, you're happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy. Awesome.
But I just wanted to say: CSS devs, try preprocessors.
Please.
Just try them, just once.
Just spend half an hour reading about the added functionality of using a CSS preprocessor.
(Did I jump in too fast - if you're unsure of what a CSS preprocessor is there's a nice intro here).
Recently I've spoken to a few FEDs who frown and shun when I mention SASS (My preprocessor of choice there are plenty available). One of the main reasons is "I can't find the bit of code when I inspect the element in a browser and it gives me a line number, but that's not where the css is cos it's compiled and blah blah…" (At this point I kinda fade out and start thinking about how this isn't an issue so much anymore and maybe they're structuring their files wrong… but that's a whole different post).
I write all of this just as Chris Coyier, who I am listening too right now, says
You're decision might be 'Should I use SASS' well the answer to that one is yes but…
OK, yeh I totally took that out of context, sorry, but please, just try it. You may hate it and go back to vanilla CSS, but you'll have a much better idea, within like one hour, of what is on the horizon for the CSS spec. That's gotta be worth it right?
Right.