I’ve recently had my eyes opened to CSS preprocessors and been looking for an excuse to use one. While I haven’t had a need for one quite yet I’ve been educating myself on them. Nathan Borror recently posted the article “Sass isn’t for me” about this very subject. While I agree with most of the points, the real gold here is in the discussion of the article. If you want some opinions or info about CSS preprocessors, the way they work, or the way people think they should work, read the comments.

What do I think

Honestly I don’t have a fixed position on the issue of Sass, LessCss, or preprocessors in general yet since I haven’t used them. However I know what I want in a preprocessor. The first and biggest issue to me is syntax, I write CSS like Nathan, everything on one line. I know CSS, I have years of experience with it’s syntax, I don’t want to learn a new syntax. That counts Sass out, for now (a new syntax is being developed for Sass that is more tightly coupled to CSS).

The second is features. Ultimately this will be the deciding factor for any project. Right now Sass and LessCSS look similar, although Compass and Sass look incredibly powerful together.

Most of us have tons of experience with CSS and are reluctant to move to anything new (remember what it took to get you away from table based layouts?) regardless of CSS shortcomings. But nonetheless CSS does have a few large shortcomings that need to be addressed and it looks like preprocessors are going to be the answer for right now.