Sass and other CSS generators were useful a few years ago for rapid code generation. However, CSS has caught up as have editors and it's hard to see what real advantage Sass has today.
Some novel things like a primaryColor variable to easily adust your theme is easily replicated with a traditional find/replace.
The fewer frameworks / compiles-to X languages you have to learn the better.
IMO, a little redundancy is better than a little complexity or a little dependency.
Using a find and replace instead of a variable holder is extremely bad practice. I should not have to copy/paste my site’s brand colors every time.
The original reason I switched was for nested structures so I could stop repeating myself. E.g.
div {
&:hover {}
.class ul {}
}
This made it much more pleasant to write in sass.
The other thing is mixins. If vanilla css doesn’t support this then it’s still a no-go.
Lastly I’m confused why sass of all things is an issue. It’s basically css, and very lightweight. You just add one step in your preferred build tool to transpile sass -> css. “vanilla is magically better” is not an argument.
I used to write only in Sass for these same reasons, but switched back to CSS.
CSS now has variables (if you really need them -- chances are you don't).
The redundancy of writing a selector multiple times is sightly annoying, but I don't think it rises to the level of value I need to include a new dependency in my app or build pipeline.
These are preferable because you can compose them as needed for elements, instead of having to make extra classes.
> CSS now has variables (if you really need them -- chances are you don't).
I fail to see how you could -not- need variables. Not many, mind you, but using none at all boggles the mind. For starters, DRY code is fairly fundamental. When you update a referenced variable you only need to do it in 1 place. Relying on "find and replace" leads to "oops I accidentally missed one, now we have a bug that could have been totally avoided".
It also helps with consistency for site theming/branding. You can define $primaryColor, $primaryHighlight, $secondaryColor, $textColor, $backgroundColor, etc, and reference these down the line instead of copy/pasting and getting bugs if the specs change.
> When you update a referenced variable you only need to do it in 1 place. Relying on "find and replace" leads to "oops I accidentally missed one, now we have a bug that could have been totally avoided".
Isn't that the point of selecting classes in the first place? That said, I understand the utility in using it for things like individual colors, as you described.
Classes do suffice if you follow the convention of "small, atom-like css classes". I personally hate this style and prefer compositional css classes for a component or a structured object.
Sass is very much still useful today. Mixins, used sparsely, can be very powerful and avoid large doses of redundancy. Also variables with good names make the job a lot easier than communicating around hexvalues.
Variables alone are not a reason to use Sass anymore. There are CSS Custom Properties [1] now, which are even more powerful in that you can dynamically override them in specific sub-sections of the DOM. The only downside is that Internet Explorer 11 doesn't support them (if that's important for your target audience).
Some novel things like a primaryColor variable to easily adust your theme is easily replicated with a traditional find/replace.
The fewer frameworks / compiles-to X languages you have to learn the better.
IMO, a little redundancy is better than a little complexity or a little dependency.