Sass 3.5 is Released

Posted 7 July 2017 by Natalie Weizenbaum

I’m excited to announce that I’ve just released the stable version of Sass 3.5. This release focuses on compatibility with new CSS syntax, and helps lay the groundwork for the upcoming module system and compatibility with Dart Sass.

Most of the major features in 3.5 were already in the release candidate, which you can read about here. But there are a handful of other changes that have been added since then:

• Sass now supports the the ::slotted() pseudo-element, including extending its selector arguments.

• The var() function may be safely passed to the CSS color functions rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), and hsla().

• Transparent colors created by Sass’s color functions will now be written as rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) rather than transparent to work around a bug in Internet Explorer. Colors written as transparent in the document will still be emitted as written.

Dart Sass Compatibility permalinkDart Sass Compatibility

I wrote last month about our plans for keeping Ruby Sass compatible with Dart Sass in the short term. Sass 3.5 begins to implement those plans by adding support for a number of small behavioral extensions added by Dart Sass:

• It’s no longer an error to @extend a selector that appears in the stylesheet, but for which unification fails. The purpose of extension errors was to prevent typos, which weren’t occurring in this case.

• Pseudo selectors that take arguments can now take any argument that matches CSS’s <declataion-value> syntax. This will provide better forwards-compatibility with new selectors.

• Pseudo selectors that contain placeholder selectors as well as non-placeholders—for example, :matches(.foo, %bar)—will no longer be eliminated. This matches the definition of a placeholder as a selector that matches nothing.

• You can now vary the indentation within an indented-syntax file, as long as it still defines a consistent tree structure.

There are also some deprecations for functionality that’s not supported in Ruby Sass:

• Extending compound selectors, such as @extend .foo.bar, is deprecated. This never followed the stated semantics of extend: elements that match the extending selector are styled as though they matches the extended selector.

When you write h1 {@extend .a.b}, this should mean that all h1 elements are styled as though they match .a.b—that is, as though they have class="a b", which means they’d match both .a and .b separately. But instead we extend only selectors that contain both .a and .b, which is incorrect.

• Color arithmetic is deprecated. Channel-by-channel arithmetic doesn’t correspond closely to intuitive understandings of color. Sass’s suite of color functions are a much cleaner and more comprehensible way of manipulating colors dynamically.

• The reference combinator, /foo/, is deprecated since it hasn’t been in the CSS specification for some time and is being removed from Chrome soon.

• The old-style :name value property syntax is deprecated. This syntax is not widely used, and is unnecessarily different from CSS.

LibSass Compatibility permalinkLibSass Compatibility

LibSass, the C++ implementation of Sass, is well on its way to compatibility with all these features. It’s not quite there yet, but we decided we didn’t want to block the 3.5 release on 100% compatibility. LibSass will release these features as it implements them.

What’s Next? permalinkWhat’s Next?

In the most immediate future, I’m going on leave for a few months, so there’s not likely to be a huge amount of work. Once that’s over, I’ll be focusing on getting Dart Sass to a full 1.0.0 release, which means spending a bunch of time making its JavaScript API compatible with node-sass.

As far as Ruby Sass goes, I’ll continue to fix bugs and add support for the CSS features as browsers start to support them. Once Dart Sass 1.0.0 is out, I’ll add new features concurrently across both Ruby and Dart until the one-year support period is up.

But for now, run gem update sass and enjoy 3.5!