A List Apart: Articles: Getting Started with Sass

CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its defining, most welcome features. CSS style sheets are just long lists of rules, each consisting of a selector and some styles to apply. But as our websites and applications get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts—has become a liability.

While some have offered proposals on how to fix CSS—adding constants or variables, for example—none have been implemented by any browser manufacturers. And even if a browser did implement a newer, better, extended CSS, it could be years before the new syntax is supported well enough in all browsers for it to make sense to use it.