Comments on: Ruby, Make and CSS

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:45:48 +0000

Shadowfiend: Almost _all_ CSS editors will break if you eliminate curly braces and semicolons.

Aizatto: Make does the job just fine. Rake would be another dependency.

By: aizatto

aizatto — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 01:40:07 +0000

Why make, why not rake?

By: Aníbal Rojas

Aníbal Rojas — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:44:50 +0000

HAML and SASS are great, once you start to use them plain old HTML/CSS is boring and cumbersome, but yes the decisition to use this tools must be “ecological” and consider the existense of designers taht could choke with this technology switch.

By: Shadowfiend

Shadowfiend — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:34:54 +0000

This is only partially true. If you use the alternative syntax (http://groups.google.com/group/haml/browse_thread/thread/36d996cf08a66702 ) for SASS, I daresay just about all syntax highlighting should work as usual. The lack of curly braces won’t be a problem, and neither will the lack of semicolons. Now, if you’re using some sort of validating system like IDEA, then it might choke on the slightly different syntax.

Granted, there are still some syntactic adjustments — like the lack of curly braces — to make. It’s worth mentioning to the SASS folks the idea that maybe they could have their system ignore curly braces, so that migrating can be made somewhat easier. But other than that, I think the syntaxes are largely similar enough that it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 29 May 2007 23:38:29 +0000

The problem with SASS is that it requires that you migrate all of your existing CSS to its syntax. It requires more work upfront, and doesn’t play nicely with existing tools.

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:43:38 +0000

Unspace has already developed an idea similar to this for Ruby called “SASS.” See http://blog.sourcecraft.net/2007/04/02/sexy-css-with-sass/ . It’s open source, so I think you’d be better off combining forces with them than going your own way…

By: Ryan Mulligan

Ryan Mulligan — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:23:31 +0000

Look into SASS, it’s the CSS equiv of Haml.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:44:19 +0000

Liam: that’s not possible since you can’t know the ratio between em and pixel units at compile time (they’re potentially different for every viewer).

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:12:51 +0000

Wow, this could have been even better! One of the biggest limitations of CSS is that we can’t mix units; we can’t say “this logo should be positioned 12px + 2em from the left side”. Had you embedded these units as Ruby types, you would be able to write (in the template):

width: #{Width};
padding: #{12.em - Width};

By: John A.

John A. — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:39:20 +0000

nice.. you going to opensource this/?