Adding some direction in your CSS

Any person that made any reasonable site knows that a having a proper CSS use is essential to a better life of the website.

But at the same time you probably already felt the “pain” of doing that, lack of browser support, files and more files, and so on.

To solve the lack of browser support, or better saying, the different approaches that you need to have for the same problem many times can be achieved with some really good CSS frameworks. But what to do with the files? Inheritance of style is something that cannot be achieve easily.

There is two projects that can help you on that: SASS and Compass. Let’s start talking about SASS.

Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

In other words it is a super language on top of CSS that offers some extra functionalities. Also it is not browser dependent, between the SASS and the CSS happens a transformation, so your SASS file is converted in a CSS file. Not perfect but fits to any actual environment, and since most of the time we need to deploy the application anyway a transformation is not going to kill you.

So what is Compass?

Compass is a stylesheet authoring framework that makes your stylesheets and markup easier to build and maintain. With compass, you write your stylesheets in Sass instead of CSS. Using the power of Sass Mixins and the Compass community, you can apply battle-tested styles from frameworks like Blueprint to your stylesheets instead of your markup.

In other words compass offers a series of build in Blueprints on top of SASS, so your styling gets even easier. Check you the intro video here.

But please! Remember that it is not a solution to all the problems, there is no language or blueprint that can solve bad layout, design issues. So before starting think about the page, the UI and then things will get smooth.

Well talking about smooth, today I go with Smooth Criminal, from Michael Jackson, but performed by David Garrett (a violinist).