Sass Blog
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Dropping Support For Old Ruby Versions
Posted 24 May 2016 by Natalie Weizenbaum
You may not know Marcel Greter, but you almost certainly know his work. For more than two years, he has been the #1 contributor on LibSass and is the #2 contributor for the history of the project. His monumental efforts, together with Michael Mifsud, are what has kept LibSass thriving recently and why it has reached feature parity with Ruby Sass and is now used by more users than Ruby Sass every day.
Presently, as we are pivoting to a new development model and release cadence, Marcel has decided it is the best time for him to exit the LibSass core team. We are truly sad to see him go, but we wish him well in all his new endeavors. Please join us in thanking him for all his hard work. You can follow and tweet him @mgreter.
Unfortunately, this leaves the LibSass project with some big shoes to fill. LibSass is a popular project that has more than 1.5 Million downloads a month and as of right now, it is in desparate need of new contributors.
We have a bunch of new features planned for…
Dropping Support For Old Ruby Versions
Posted 29 February 2016 by Natalie Weizenbaum
As of version 3.5, Ruby Sass will drop support for Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.3. We will continue to support Ruby 2.0.0 and higher.
Ruby 1.8.7 was retired by the Ruby maintainers in June 2013, and Ruby 1.9.3 was retired in February 2015. Despite that, we continued to maintain support for older versions because Ruby 1.8.7 was installed by default on Mac OS X through Mountain Lion (which was released in July 2012).
There are many users of Sass who aren’t independently users of Ruby. We wanted to minimize the amount of work these users need to do to use Sass, which means letting it run on their machine without also requiring them to install a new language.
That decision wasn’t without costs, though. Most seriously, recent versions of the listen package didn’t support older Ruby versions, and older versions of RubyGems weren’t clever enough to avoid downloading them on incompatible Ruby versions. To work around this, we bundled an older version of listen with Sass and used it for users who…
Cleaning Up Interpolation
Posted 9 December 2015 by Natalie Weizenbaum
Interpolation—the ability to add variables and other snippets using #{...}—is one of the handiest all-purpose features of Sass. You can use it just about everywhere you might need to inject a variable, a function call, or some other expression. In most of those places it just plops the value into the surrounding text. It’s straightforward, easy to understand, and useful, which is exactly what we want from a feature.
Unfortunately, that’s only true in most places. For complicated historical reasons, there’s one place where interpolation goes a little bit bananas: inside an expression but outside quotes. Most of the time, it makes sense; if you write display: -#{$prefix}-box, you’ll get what you expect. But if any operators like + are used next to the interpolation, you start to get weird output. For example, $name + #{$counter + 1} might return an unquoted string containing the text name + 3.
This is really weird behavior. Why does + behave differently here than it does everywhere else…
Sass 3.4 is Released
Posted 19 August 2014 by Natalie Weizenbaum
We’ve been trying to increase the pace of Sass releases, and it looks like we’ve succeeded. A mere five months after the release of Sass 3.3, we’re announcing the release of Sass 3.4.0, codename Selective Steve. Faster releases mean fewer major features per release, so there are only two big new things to talk about (although there are plenty of little improvements you can read about in the changelog). As the version name suggests, both of these features have to do with selectors.
Using & in SassScript permalinkUsing & in SassScript permalink Using & in SassScript permalinkUsing & in SassScript
“SassScript” is what we call the mini-language Sass uses for variables, property values, and so forth. It’s mostly just CSS values, but it also supports custom functions, arithmetic, and so forth. In Sass 3.4, we added support for something new: the parent selector, &.
Most Sass users will probably recognize & from its previous appearances in selectors around the world, where it’s used to explicitly refer to the parent selector. For example, in .parent...
Sass 3.3 is Released
Posted 8 March 2014 by Natalie Weizenbaum
After ironing out a bunch of bugs in numerous release candidates, we’re finally ready to release Sass 3.3.0, codename Maptastic Maple, for public consumption. This release has a lot of exciting new features that you can read about in full in the changelog, but there are three that I want to draw your attention to in particular.
Maps in SassScript permalinkMaps in SassScript permalink Maps in SassScript permalinkMaps in SassScript
As language designers, most of our job is to listen to feedback from users and act upon it. This is tricker than it sounds: users are very good at knowing the precise thing that they want to accomplish, but they tend not to have a sense of how that fits into the big picture. So we take a large volume of user requests, try to distill the core needs that aren’t being met, and see if we can come up with features that hit as many of those as possible as simply as possible.
SassScript maps are a great example of this. We had a lot of users requesting things like variable interpolation, so they could write things like…