Karsten Biedermann

Posted on Mar 20 • Updated on Mar 26

Goodbye SASS 👋, welcome back native CSS

#webdev #css #html #beginners

Sass has established itself as a powerful preprocessor installed locally, forming the backbone of my projects for over a decade. It enabled me to efficiently organize scalable and stable CSS packages. Even today, I still consider Sass to be an extraordinarily powerful tool. Yet, as we step into the year 2024, it's undeniable that CSS has undergone rapid development. Features that were once unique to Sass are now natively integrated into CSS, including variables and the latest highlight: CSS Nesting.

Variables

Defining variables was long seen as a unique strength of SCSS, allowing for the centralized management of many properties, a feature sorely missed in CSS for a long time. Today, however, variables can also be defined in CSS in a manner similar to Sass. A significant difference, however, is that Sass variables exist exclusively within the preprocessor context, while CSS variables can be used in the browser and even dynamically overwritten via JavaScript.

:root {
  --button-padding: 10px 20px;
  --button-bg-color: #007bff;
  --button-text-color: #ffffff;
  --button-border-radius: 8px;
}

.button {
  padding: var(--button-padding);
  background-color: var(--button-bg-color);
  color: var(--button-text-color);
  border-radius: var(--button-border-radius);
  border: none;
  cursor: pointer;
  transition: background-color 0.3s;
}

CSS Nesting

The ability to define the style rules of one element within another significantly simplifies writing CSS. Instead of repeatedly using the same selector for subordinate elements or pseudo-selectors, nesting allows grouping these within a parent selector. This technique leads to a clear, hierarchically structured, and thus more efficient codebase.

With browser support of over 84% for CSS Nesting and 86% for the Nesting Selector, this technique is becoming increasingly accessible.

.blog {
  position: relative;
  padding: 1rem;
  background: var(--neutral-100);

    .blog-item {
      border: 1px solid var(--neutral-200);

      & span {
        font-size: 1rem;
      }
  }
}

The :is Pseudo-Class

The :is pseudo-class revolutionizes the selector concept by accepting a list of selectors and styling all elements that match any of these selectors. This greatly facilitates the selection and styling of elements in the DOM.

:is(selector1, selector2, selector3) {
  /* styles */
}

Instead of long selector lists, you can use :is() to improve readability while avoiding a long selector.

The : has() pseudo-class

The CSS pseudo-class :has() provides a powerful way to select an element based on its descendants, similar to the application of conditional styles.

.hero:has(.hero-button) {
  background-color: var(--accent-50);
}

Container queries

Container Queries are considered the most significant innovation in web design since CSS3. They expand the concept of Responsive Design by allowing elements to adjust based on the size of their containers. This technology enables the design of an element to dynamically change depending on the context, leading to a more flexible and adaptive design.

.component {
  --theme: dark;
  container-name: fancy;
}

@container fancy style(--theme: dark) {
  .fancy {
    /* dark styles. */
  }
}

.parent-container {
  container-type: inline-size;

  .headline {
    font-size: 2rem;
  }

  @container (width >= 720px) {
    .headline {
      font-size: 2.5rem;
    }
  }
}

If the container fancy have the variable --theme: dark, add the following CSS.

Cascade layers

With cascade layers, we can avoid the nesting of classes, IDs, etc. for higher specificity by assigning our own layer (layer). Using the @layer at-rule and layered @imports, we can build our own layers of the cascade - from low-priority styles like resets and defaults, through themes, frameworks, and design systems, to the highest priority styles like components, utilities, and overrides. Cascade layers provide more control.

@layer utilities {
  .button {
    padding: 0.5rem;
  }

  .button--lg {
    padding: 0.8rem;
  }
}

Future of SASS

Does this mean Sass has become obsolete? Not at all. Mixins and functions, such as the conversion of pixels to rem, remain irreplaceable advantages of Sass. Nevertheless, I have decided to forego Sass for most of my projects. Instead, I use predefined code blocks and packages in my Sublime Editor, which has significantly improved my workflow.

Goodbye SASS?

I truly believe that in 2024, the benefits of Sass, including installation, usage, and compilation issues, no longer justify its use. The scalability and user-friendliness of modern CSS make it possible to do without additional tools.

My Themex project demonstrates how powerful the combination of new CSS features can be: https://app.themexproject.com

With the advancement of CSS, I look forward to implementing small and large projects directly and straightforwardly.

Goodbye Sass, and thank you!

Top comments (56)

Angela Caldas • Mar 20

I love pure CSS, but I still love using Sass for its mixins, functions and extends. Also, nesting in Sass is a little better than nesting in CSS when you use BEM in your projects, for example:

.block {
  // in Sass you would break the class name like this:
  &_element {
    // this would not work with CSS nesting
  }
}

But I am eager to be able to do this and more on CSS again! Thanks for the article!

Andrew Bone • Mar 21 • Edited

One thing I've starting doing in my code bases is replacing the M in BEM to use has where possible.

<button class="btn">
  <span>
    First Button
  </span>
</button>

<button class="btn btn--with-icon">
  <svg height="1em" width="1em">
    <!-- some svg code -->
  </svg>
  <span>
    Second Button
  </span>
</button>

/* tradition BEM */
.btn {
  background-color: tomato;

  /* this only works in SASS */
  &--with-icon {
    background-color: lime;
  }
}

/* BEM with has */
.btn {
  background-color: tomato;

  /* this works in vanilla CSS!! */
  &:has(> svg) {
    background-color: lime;
  }
}

I still use SASS and BEM commercially but these little steps closer to regular CSS can only be a win in my opinion.

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 21

This is a good example how you can transform from scss to css. Personally, I haven't used BEM for a long time. In general, I think it's good to break with conventions, especially when it obviously prevents you from trying something new.

Angela Caldas • Mar 21

Nice! Thanks for sharing this approach!

Massimo Artizzu • Mar 22

Many of the latest advancements in CSS help you ditch BEM for something much less verbose. Encapsulated styles (especially with @scope or a shadow DOM), or @layers, will definitely help you with that.

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 20

I agree! In some cases, it looks better in SASS, especially if you use BEM. As always, it's a compromise 😊.

Thomas Bnt ☕ • Mar 20 • Edited

Yes! I'm still using SASS because BEM is powerful to write good code. But I will try CSS3 with news features likes @container and @layer, seems nice!

Angela Caldas • Mar 20

I definitely must try the features you mentioned since I've only read about them!

Oluwafemi Durodola • Mar 25 • Edited

But will this work?

.block {
    //...
    .block_element {
        // ...
    }
  }

Angela Caldas • Mar 25

Yep, this works. The syntax I used doesn't.

Andrew Bone • Mar 27

The main different between these 2 is specificity.

.block {
  /* anything here has a specificity score of 10 */

  &__element {
    /* anything here has a specificity score of 10 */
  }
}

.block {
  /* anything here has a specificity score of 10 */

  & .block__element {
    /* anything here has a specificity score of 20 */
  }
}

Having higher specificity means things are harder to override later and, in some cases, leads to the dreaded !important

This example isn't too bad but the further you nest the more likely you are to have run away specificity.

Angela Caldas • Mar 27

Thanks for sharing this specificity issue, I wasn't aware!

András Tóth • Mar 20

I fully agree with you. However the more CSS can do from SASS the less any transpiler need to work, so the result will be closer to what you actually wrote. That's a good thing in my opinion.

Angela Caldas • Mar 20

Yeah, it is certainly a great thing, I agree with you, and I hope CSS gets even more powerful. I really enjoy using CSS, but at work, we still use Sass

András Tóth • Mar 21

Well it's a great tool, so it does not sound so bad as forced to write CSS-in-JS or to be barred from writing CSS because of a utility based framework.

Convergente Studio • Mar 27

Yeah, mixins are one of the best things on Sass, cuz this and other stuffs is why i still using even nowaday

Andrew Bone • Mar 20

I'm really looking forward to reusable functions and mixins. They're a little ways off yet but that doesn't stop the hype 😅

Future of CSS: Functions and Mixins

Andrew Bone ・ Feb 15

#css #webdev #future

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 20

Ohhh yes! That would be so great!

Convergente Studio • Mar 27

Oohhh the great Andrew Bone, such a famous person known in Twitter, yeah I really agree, but Sass still being a great, despite of new CSS modern in 2024

Ben Halpern • Mar 20

I sign off on this

Rasmus Schultz • Mar 23

Modern CSS is awesome - but it's a bit late to say goodbye to SASS, I think.

By now, most software uses a component-oriented UI library of some sort (React, Svelte, Vue, Solid, etc.) and the question facing most developers isn't really SASS vs CSS anymore - it's more like SASS/CSS vs some sort of CSS abstraction... Emotion, Panda, StyleX, Tailwind, etc.

While CSS has caught up with most of the things we needed SASS for, the community has moved on from selectors to inline styling approaches, which just generally works better with components.

Remember when SASS was the brand new shiny, and the nested structure of SASS promised to nicely mirror the structure of the HTML elements? Of course, this turned out to be a bad idea, because you end up with compiled selectors that are way too specific, and everything quickly stopped doing it. It was a lot of the initial appeal though, I think.

By now, the easiest, most intuitive, most straight forward approach, is to put your styles directly on the elements in your components. No more dead selectors getting left behind. No more searching through the DOM in devtools trying to figure out what's changing the color of that button. Where is that rule that makes it bold on hover? It's right there, on the button element - it isn't accidentally matching anything else, it isn't being accidentally overridden by a more specific rule, and so on.

The choice between SASS and CSS is easier than ever before. Just choose. It's not that important.

But now there are dozens of libraries and approaches to CSS-in-JS, utility CSS generators, inline CSS libraries, and on and on - that choice is harder than ever.

(I wonder if CSS will ever catch up with the need for inline styling?)

András Tóth • Mar 20

Until we have what you said mixins, functions and extends we are missing one of the most important tool of clean coding: encapsulation of complexity. To be effective, you have to find the right properties that belong together and extract them into something meaningful, that is closer to the abstractions of the page.

But I do believe they can be incorporated into pure CSS. (As I think TypeScript at this point should be just there in browser, like how it works with deno).

eshimischi • Mar 21

Typescript won’t be in browser, because at the end it converts into JS, which is deno doing too. TS is just a superset

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Mar 23

Does this mean Sass has become obsolete? Not at all. Mixins and functions, such as the conversion of pixels to rem, remain irreplaceable advantages of Sass

Irreplaceable? Far from it! Native CSS is getting functions and mixins too relatively soon; the discussion around the spec is still ongoing, but it is very unlikely to just die out. SASS will eventually just be obsolete.

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 23

Yes ❤️! github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues...

Dmitriy A. • Mar 20

:has() is great! We are using it for a while now.
Nesting is one of the most crucial part of SASS, not sure if cascading can replace it though 🤔

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 20

Maybe not replace it. I think some people will continue to use Sass. However, I believe it's beneficial to occasionally question the way we write CSS. There have been times when I found myself complicating things simply out of habit 😉.

Dmitriy A. • Mar 20

Agree, but SASS with proper linter is strict enough to keep CSS code streamlined

Miia • Mar 27

Great update!

Usually can't use SASS in my projects as it is not supported any more in the CMSs I use. And nice to know that nesting support in pure CSS starts to be on a level where it is acceptable to be used!

Sm0ke • Mar 21 • Edited

cool

Jaime López • Mar 21

Congrats for the article. Very well written and really good discussion about it.

Karsten Biedermann • Mar 21

Thank you!

Shailen Naidoo • Mar 20

This is great but you would still need a preprocessor to ensure the newer version of CSS is backwards compatiable.

Andrew Bone • Mar 20

With browsers entering a new 'evergreen' phase this is becoming less and less of a problem. IE was an issue for a long time but with that gone most users will always be on, or close to, the latest release meaning we can improve our code bases at speed.

The new baseline initiative is a great rule of thumb, once it's green us that feature! 😅