Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world. After creating several of the most popular sass plugins, Miriam became a core contributor to the language.
More recently, the entire OddBird team contracted with Google to design and implement high-priority Sass features, and re-build the website with a new Sass playground.
A huge thank you to the individuals and organizations sponsoring OddBird’s open source work!
We love contributing back to the languages & tools that developers rely on, from CSS & Sass to browser polyfills and Python. Help us keep that work sustainable and focused on developer needs!
Inspect and manipulate the new CSS color formats in Sass!
CSS has a range of new color functions that support wider color gamuts (like display-p3) and perceptually uniform color adjustments (like oklch). Sass now provides additional tools for working with these new color formats, and converting between them.
A quick guide to adopting the modern Sass API
Sass compilation can be a speed bottleneck in your build, but it doesn’t have to be anymore.
Rethinking the CSS mixin proposal after CSS Day
The CSS Working Group has agreed to move forward with CSS-native mixins. But some recent mixin-like CSS tricks have an advantage that the official proposal doesn’t account for: they make it easy to remove a mixin after it’s already been mixed in.
In this episode of the Mechanical Ink podcast, host Schalk Neethling sits down with Miriam Suzanne, a multifaceted expert in web development, an invited expert to the CSS Working Group, and a founder of OddBird.
pkg: URLsA quick guide to using the new Node.js package importer
Enabling pkg: URLs is quick and straightforward, and simplifies using packages from the node_modules folder.
A new proposal for importing from NPM packages in Sass
UI libraries like Vuetify and Bootstrap
make it easy to extend their themes by providing
Sass source files with their NPM packages.
Now, Sass is requesting feedback on
a simpler way to import those libraries
into your Sass styles with e.g. @use "pkg:bootstrap".
What happens if the ‘pace layers’ get out of sync?
“Ask not just: How well does it work? But also: How well does it fail? What happens when something goes wrong?” —Jeremy Keith
A new proposal for color management in Sass
There’s been a lot of exciting work in the CSS color specifications lately, and since the new features are already starting to land in browsers, we’ve been preparing to add support in Sass as well. My proposal for that is published and ready for public feedback!
A podcast focusing on front end development but also covering a wide range of web development and design topics. We talked about CSS, Sass, and work being done in the W3C CSS Working Group.
I talk with Claire and Steph about my journey into webdev and onto the CSSWG, what I find frustrating about how others use CSS, and the three specs I’m working on.
I chat with Bruce Lawson & Vadim Makeev about Sass & Susy, CSS Layers & compatibility, Container Queries, and the CSS Working Group.
I join Ari, Ben, and Tessa to talk about getting into CSS from other languages, the absurdly massive problem CSS is designed to solve, and the mental model behind the language.
How to make the editing experience better
Since the inception of CSS in 1994, the cascade and inheritance have defined how we design on the web. Both are powerful features, but as authors we’ve had very little control over how they interact. Selector specificity and source order provide some minimal “layering” control, without a lot of nuance – and inheritance requires an unbroken lineage. Now, CSS Custom Properties allow us to manage and control both cascade and inheritance in new ways.
A workshop with practical steps to take full advantage of the web
Jina and I answer questions about CSS, Sass, Design Systems, and more!
A spinoff of the Party Corgi Network discord. I chat with Chris Biscardi about The CSS Working Group, open-source projects, art, and music.
I drop by the show to talk about Sass in 2019, design tokens, OddBird, unused CSS, new CSS properties, and Dave & Chris’ explanation of revert.
Sass recently launched a major new feature you might recognize from other languages: a module system. The new syntax will replace @import with @use and @forward – a big step forward for making Sass partials (one of the language’s most used features) more readable, performant, and safe. This article goes…
Getting started with @use and @forward
Dart Sass (the primary Sass implementation) released version 1.23.0 last night with a major new feature: modules. This is a common feature in many languages – but for those of us who primarily write CSS, it can be a big mental shift. Let’s take a look at the basics.
A workshop with practical use-cases, tooling, and pitfalls
Miriam talks with the Views on Vue panel about design, tools, fonts, and more.
An agile approach to design systems on a budget
Design systems streamline development, communication, and consistency – but often rely on dedicated teams and extended budgets. We wanted a tool to create and maintain living style guides & pattern libraries in an agile process, and on a budget. Herman helps keep our development flow simple, and our UX consistent…
Excerpt from Jump Start Sass, chapter 11
Clean, beautiful code should be a goal in every project. If other developers need to make a change, they should be able to read what is there and understand it. Readable code is the core of maintainability. This excerpt from Miriam’s book, Jump Start Sass will help get you started…
Practical media helpers for Susy3
Most grids change with the viewport – and Susy needs new settings at each breakpoint. Susy3 is designed without mixins for complete flexibility from project to project, but it can be useful to build additional tools and shortcuts as you go. Here are some snippets to help you get started…
Make grid systems your fallback plan
We’re excited to introduce Susy 3.0, a major update to our popular grid-math calculator – now more focused and flexible than ever. Susy was designed to make layout math easy, without forcing you into generic patterns and ugly markup. But grid systems are on the way out, replaced by real CSS layout specs that live in the browser. With Susy3, we want to help make that a smooth transition.
Susy 3.0 will be released in the next week, if all goes well, and there’s a lot to write about it. I wanted to start with a detailed overview of one core concept: spread.
Viewport units have been around for several years now, with near-perfect support in the major browsers, but I keep finding new and exciting ways to use them. I thought it would be fun to review the basics, and then round-up some of my favorite use-cases.
You don’t need safe-get-function utilities
The Sass 3.5 Release Candidate includes support for first-class functions. What are they, how do we use them, and what tools can we use to future-proof our Sass toolkits in advance?
Code documentation is ideally written as close to the actual code as possible, but compiled into a comprehensive set of documentation that includes code from all languages in use. Here’s how we intend to do that.
No matter what acronym drives your selectors (BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ETC), loops can help keep your patterns more readable and maintainable, baking them directly into your code. We’ll take a look at what loops can do, and how to use them in the major CSS preprocessors.
I joined Tim Evko and M. David Green for their SitePoint podcast – The Versioning Show. We discussed going from lurker to speaker, the importance of writing about what you’re learning, stumbling into fame, approaching new projects, and unit testing in Sass.
I did a live Q&A at SitePoint in August, talking about: Customizing Susy for your projects Other ways to do layouts (and why you might not even need a toolkit) How to select a toolkit, or build your very own!
I did a live Q&A at SitePoint talking about: Customizing Susy for your projects Other ways to do layouts (and why you might not even need a toolkit) How to select a toolkit, or build your very own!
Get up to speed with Sass in a weekend…
Using Sass, you can write your stylesheets in a more concise, dynamic, and readable way, and cut down many of the repetitive tasks that come with writing vanilla CSS. This book provides a thorough introduction to Sass for the beginner.
Excerpt from Jump Start Sass, chapter 11
I’m excited to release Jump Start Sass, a book I co-authored with Kitty Giraudel. Digital copies are available from SitePoint, with print editions sold by O’Reilly. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 11, Sass Architecture.
a case-study in building and sharing open-source Sass
SassConf is right around the corner, and Claudina has been working hard to make it happen!
The difference between map-set and map-merge? Almost nothing.