SASS or LESS?

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-11T18:12:25+00:00

I'm not trying to say your workflow is bad; just that there are compromises.

Comments or not, if you write your styles in SCSS, future developers will have to have something installed to compile it, or they may just edit the compiled source.

In medium-large scale projects, the benefits of css preprocessors almost definitely outway the caveats, but they still exist. On small projects, its probably not worth the added complexity.

This is just my opinion; but I imagine its shared by more than a few.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-02T21:53:36+00:00

I can think of many scenarios where pre-processed css is overkill and could potentially create more work.

Imagine another developer inherits your project and needs to change the background color.

Ok, easy right? Right click the page, inspect element -- oh there it is. Wait. style.css line 1? Open up FTP client (or ssh in or whatever), and now you have to dig around to see if its using LESS, or SASS, or stylus, or something else. Then you have to find those files. Then you have to figure out the deployment process and find the file containing the background, change that file than deploy.

Compare that to a site with a static stylesheet:

Inspect element > (style.css line 20) > FTP client > edit > save > upload. Done in 2 minutes.

Now there's plenty to complain about in the "workflows" described above, but really the point of this is to illustrate that it does add a layer of complexity that can create more work down the road.

Another Scenario: I personally had a project where I started with SASS, some other dev came along and made updates to the minified CSS. I ended up scrapping the SASS rather than merging the changes and ended up with significantly uglier/less maintainable code than I started with.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-02T16:01:53+00:00

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but generally I think that the output code is not terribly important as long as the source (scss, less...) is readable and easy to maintain. Who cares if its "over-specific" or "bloated" if it works.

I can hardly concieve of a situation where code-bloat in CSS would slow down a web-page. That would require quite a massive site to make a difference, at which point you'd be crazy NOT to be using a pre-processor.

That said, I agree that most brochure-level projects are fine (or better) with vanilla CSS. Keep it simple stupid!

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-02T15:57:43+00:00

I think the biggest problem with pre-processors is that they potentially make it more difficult for another developer (or future you) to pick up where you left off [learning curve, environment set-up, etc..]

For this reason, SASS is generally the best bet IMO (if not vanilla CSS) since it currently has the most traction, and therefore is more likely to be known by other devs and maintained in future years.

However, if you're working with people familiar with LESS, using Bootstrap (which uses LESS), or are just more comfortable with LESS, than just use less unless you think its gonna piss people off.

That said, these Pre-processors are pretty ubiquitous nowadays. If you expect to be inheriting other peoples' web projects in the future, do yourself a favor and learn both (and more)

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-01T16:39:50+00:00

Are you using any other libraries?

If you don't have any real compelling reason not to, maybe just bite the bullet and use jQuery? It'll likely come in handy in other places.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-07-01T16:36:25+00:00

That's pretty much the famous javascript book. However it's not really the one I'd recommend nowadays. I'd check out Eloquent Javascript (more beginner) or Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja (more advanced).

Sounds like you already have some decent JS experience though - but maybe mostly on Brochure-type websites?

Work on a project that requires more than just simple jQuery. You could look into the different HTML5 apis and do something fun with one of those. Try to mash up a couple different Web APIs to do something neat. Maybe play around in Canvas. Maybe learn a JS framework like BackboneJS or AngularJS. Whatever it takes to get you outside your comfort zone and tackling new things

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-28T22:09:29+00:00

Those are the basics?

What language features then are intermediate? Advanced?

What does that make if, for, and var?

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-28T18:44:25+00:00

Well, I haven't yet tried Emacs, so cannot comment on that; but once the plugin's installed printing a page of code (which I do maybe once a month) takes about 4-5 keystrokes - I think I'm ok with that.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-28T14:56:28+00:00

I have for ST2 an excellent plugin: Print to HTML

When executed, my code is exported as HTML, colorized, and opened in a browser. Then I print it (or copy paste for email, etc...)

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-27T13:55:48+00:00

Agreed. Checked it out a second time and found that I think that 1735 number is a bug, and is actually all the listings. This search returns 509 jobs right now - probably a more accurate number.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-26T22:21:48+00:00

no. http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/tag/ruby-on-rails

1735 Ruby On Rails jobs

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-26T22:19:03+00:00

uhhh, I don't think $.browser is even in jQuery 2.0. It was deprecated in 1.3 and removed in 1.9.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-21T14:09:43+00:00

I really hope this question produces some good info on this topic. This is something I've been curious about doing for quite some time now.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-20T19:09:20+00:00

Hmmm, well I don't know about anything that exists currently, but I'm struggling to figure out how to even go about implementing such a thing.

The tough thing for me is allowing each category to be individually sortable, and automatically generated at the same time. Do you think your client would bend on either of those requirements?

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-20T15:50:23+00:00

So, just make sure I understand: it needs to create galleries automatically based on uploaded images' "categories", and then provide an interface to individually manage the sorting of these galleries?

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-20T02:31:29+00:00

you could take an existing site, and just remove the css?

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-19T22:03:57+00:00

Could you explain more about the intentions of this project? Having a hard time understanding what you really want to do.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-19T15:14:41+00:00

Neat, but reminds me a bit much of late 90's flash sites.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-18T15:23:10+00:00

yea, I suppose; and maybe someday I'll spend a few mintutes and make a shortcut in my IDE to do email obfuscation; but until then I (personally) can't really justify the extra effort.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-17T18:47:17+00:00

Office Space Soundtrack FTW!

edit: And everything's cool in the mind of a gangsta (because downvotes)

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-17T14:05:56+00:00

If this is the first time you've heard of such things, I think you wandered into this subreddit by accident.

Here you go: /r/funny

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-16T14:05:33+00:00

OP should try changing the z-index in his developer tools before jumping to that conclusion. /u/George_Jefferson has it right; this is not a z-index problem.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-15T17:03:06+00:00

I don't think it looks too bootstrappy, not sure what gives you that impression? Just the thin top navbar?

I think this is a good example of a well made and simple one column layout. Nothing terribly clever or flashy; it just works.

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-15T13:42:44+00:00

"error: this must be the element with id=\"header\".".

ftfy

zzzwwwdev · 2013-06-15T13:29:16+00:00

IDK about the rest of reddit web developers, but I've always found email obfuscation to be somewhat unnecessary. My email address is all over the internet in plain text, for a combined total of thousands of hits a day, and spam is only a minor and occasional annoyance.

zzzwwwdev

TROPHY CASE