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

“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 { .child & { ... } }, & refers to .parent, and this compiles to .child .parent { ... }.

Now & works much the same way in SassScript. It refers to the same parent selector, but instead of just being dropped in it’s exposed as a list of lists to make it easy for functions to inspect and manipulate it. For example, if you write .foo .bar, .baz { $selector: & }, $selector will be ((".foo" ".bar"), (".baz",)).

We had originally slated this feature for version 3.3, but we took it out when we realized it was really hard to use these selectors in a way that didn’t break when they contained commas. Because of that, we decided to delay it for a version to give us time to come up with its compantion feature: selector functions.

Selector Functions permalinkSelector Functions

The problem with just exposing & was that the only way to use it with other selectors was by glomming them together as strings. This works okay in simple cases, but when you write #{$selector} .child and $selector is .foo, .bar, you want .foo .child, .bar .child but you get .foo, .bar .child. This is no good at all.

To solve this, we added a slew of functions that use Sass’s powerful built-in selector logic to do the right thing. For example, you can now write selector-nest(".foo, .bar", ".child") and get exactly what you want. These functions all return the same sort of nested-list representation that & uses,but they’re very liberal in what they accept: anything from nested lists to plain old strings.

If you want to see every selector function we thought up, check out the changelog. I do want to highlight a few that I’m particularly fond of, though. You’ve already seen selector-nest(), and selector-append() is a close relative. The difference between them is whitespace: selector-nest() adds a space between its selectors, where selector-append() doesn’t. This means that selector-append(".foo, .bar", "-suffix") returns .foo-suffix, .bar-suffix.

Another function I like a lot is selector-replace(). This does a search-and-replace of one selector within another, but it’s a lot more clever than your basic string replace. It uses Sass’s @extend logic to replace selectors semantically, as though every element matched by the replacement selector was also matched by the replaced selector. For example, selector-replace(".foo.bar.baz", ".foo.baz", ".qux") returns .bar.qux.

The last really powerful function I want to draw your attention to is selector-unify(). This takes two selectors and returns a new selector that matches only elements that are matched by both input selectors. This is an operation Sass uses a lot internally, and now users can access it as well. For example, selector-unify(".foo.bar", ".bar.baz") will return .foo.bar.baz.

What’s Next? permalinkWhat’s Next?

I won’t rule out the possibility of Sass 3.5 existing, but Chris and I plan to focus pretty hard on Sass 4.0. The big feature for 4.0 is going to be @import, or rather the lack thereof. Our current import system is beginning to show its age in a major way, and we intend to replace it wholesale, up to and including the name. As of 4.0, the recommended way of pulling in other Sass files will be @use.

Among the features we’re planning for @use are two that have been widely requested. You’ll be able to import CSS stylesheets directly into your Sass ones, and each stylesheet will only be run once, no matter how many times it’s imported.

Until then, though, run gem update sass and enjoy Selective Steve!