Compass Makes Writing CSS Fun Again

One of the things that has always annoyed me about web development is that writing CSS generally becomes a task that has a major lack of the features that you would expect in a programming language, even one as simple as JavaScript. These features that would be wonderful to have when working with CSS are the ability to use variables to define a set of basic colors that are in use across the site in one place, and then use the variable name throughout the stylesheet.

I can honestly say that using Compass to generate the CSS for a site takes the tediousness out of the process, making it much more efficient and enjoyable.

As it happens, there is a tool that allows you to improve CSS in these ways and more, allowing you to structure your CSS in a more efficient method than can typically be created by all but the most organized developers or designers. This tool is called SASS, which stands for Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets. This provides the most basic structure and rules of the process, and more about SASS can be found here.

While SASS has its niceties, it is taken to the next level with Compass, which is built on top of the basis of SASS, allowing developers to utilize additional functionality that was not present in the earlier versions of SASS. You can find out more about Compass here.

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