please excuse my inexperience with, and lack of understanding of, Sass.
Basically I was assigned to do some edits on a site which has a main css page and a few scss subpages, all organized through an ftp directory.
I'm just confused how the index knows where to pull the scss pages in the ftp directory? I've looked through the code for the index page, as well as the linked css and js pages, and can't find any part that references the scss pages. Yet they still load within the original css? Am I missing something?
Thanks for the clarification.
SCSS is a preprocessor language. That means it will be converted to CSS. The SCSS files do not get loaded by the website. Instead you will have to make your changes to the SCSS files and then convert them to CSS. It is likely that there is a system in place which takes care of that for you. Take a look around and find out whether there is a gulpfile or a gruntfile hanging out somewhere.
The main.scss file gets compiled to the main.css file. The output produced by the sass compiler replaces the main.css file. There is no link. You need to compile your main.scss file using sass.
Apart from that, you use 'CSS file' rather than 'CSS page' as CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheet which is definitely not page in itself.
Web browsers don't know what a SCSS or SASS file is. They only load CSS.
Your site could have a build tool (grunt, gulp, rake etc) to compile your .scss source files into .css files, which is then published to your web site.
Sometimes your application server will know how to do the translation on the fly and you can just edit the .scss file.
A lot of the time many .scss files will be combined into one .css file so you are often editing a different file to what you would expect when you look at what .css is loaded the browser.
Related
I was given some files from another developer and was told to make some changes. Within the file structure, there's a .css file and a .css.map file.
I'm relatively new to SASS, but my understanding is that you create a .scss file and use command line: sass --watch style.scss:style.css, which generates the .css.map file and compiles the sass into css.
Is there a way to work backwards with just the .css file and the .css.map file to generate the .scss files, or did the other dev just maybe forget to give me these files?
The CSS is the output of Sass and you cannot generate the original Sass files from the CSS.
As stated by thesassway, source maps (.css.map) seek to bridge the gap between higher-level languages like CoffeeScript and Sass and the lower-level languages they compile down to (JavaScript and CSS). Source maps allow you to see the original source (the CoffeeScript or Sass) instead of the compiled JavaScript or CSS while debugging.
(TL;DR, they are for debugging)
If you were to edit the CSS output files without using SASS to compile them, the next person who writes in the Sass files and compiles them will overwrite your work.
I'm not sure why the other dev will want you to make changes directly to the CSS output files, but asking them for guidance on what that are expecting you to do won't hurt anyone. :)
Yes you can. Using Chrome, inspect something on the page, go to "Sources" tab, go to "Page" tab, expand down to the SCSS files generated from the CSS Map (basically the original SCSS files).
Example below is using WordPress and I was in your situation where all I had was the CSS Map file. Just copy and/or save the files one by one into the appropriate folder. Now you have the SCSS files :)
I'm working on a Create-React-App project, which notoriously does not support css transpilers such as SASS and Less. The general solution, as discussed here and here, is to compile the source .less/.scss and import the build product .css into your components. Then you can remove all .css from source control and only track .less/.scss.
This is a fine solution, but only a handful of my components really need Less for clarity/extensibility; for the most part, pure css is fine. So, what I'd like to do is use .css everywhere except for some .less sprinkled in here and there. I can configure this with the Less compiler, but for source control I'd like to watch only the "source" css files, and ignore the "build" css files (generated from Less). Because of this I cannot blanket .gitignore all .css, since some are truly source files.
So, is there a glob pattern for this? Maybe:
*.css where *.less
I see two other possible solutions:
switch everything to .less, even when it's not necessary, and go on ignoring all *.css
selectively .gitignore only the .css that are build products.
I like option 2, but it just seems a little error prone and more maintenance.
Switch everything to less is the verter choice: only one why to make css. It is also easiest to understand how project works for a colleague.
You should also keep different css folders for generated and non generated css file. Then, you can just ignore folder with generated.
You could get 2 folders for exemple src and dist
Simply put source .css and .less files in the src folder and when compiling this folder, copy the .css files to the dist one while .less files are compiled.
But I prefer your "all .less" approach which is less confusing for other developpers.
Forgive me if this is naive, but I am used to using just CSS. Sass seems pretty cool and I'm down to learn it, but for some reason many of the Javascript or jQuery plugins I'm downloading have both a CSS and SCSS file associated with the stylesheet. I don't want to have to be editing two files to get results on the page, why would both be there when they seem like copies except for a few key areas? See image below, seems like there is an extra CSS file per SCSS. Is that because some browsers cannot compile the SCSS?
CSS and SCSS in same directory
Is that because some browsers cannot compile the SCSS?
Yes. There is a command line utility which converts the .scss to .css. Probably the .map file is a reverse-conversion aid for browser inspectors that understand it.
Whenever I have generated files (like a .min.js, or in your case .css that came from a .scss), I make sure the appropriate command-line conversion tool is executed automatically as part of my build script.
I'm not sure what kind of build system you are using, but there is some command line tool for conversion that will need to be executed.
You are not expected to manually update both formats. SCSS to CSS command-line converters existed long before any browser (is there one yet?) started to support SCSS.
No browser (at least major) is able to directly use SASS (or LESS). You always need to compile scss files to css, before you could use them.
You can compile css by build tools like grunt or gulp. You can even configure it to watch updates in scss files and recompile css if anything was changed.
You could have following types of files after build:
style.scss <- this is source file
style.css <- this is css file created from SASS file
style.min.css <- this is css file minified
style.css.map <- this is source map of scss file
Here you can read why css files are minified. Here you can read what are source maps for.
I am planning on dividing up my LESS CSS into multiple files to modularize my CSS and make it easier to manage and maintain. Ultimately I will be using #import to import all of my modular CSS files into one file that will get enqueued in WordPress.
Is #import a bad idea for performance?
Yes, using multiple imports will incurr equivalent number of file requests the browser has to make.
As long as you compile the LESS source into a CSS file and include that CSS file as the stylesheet for your site, performance will not be an issue.
For example when you make a Wordpress theme you can make a folder for your CSS and then compile it using for example simpLESS (if you are on Windows)
Sample template directory structure:
-themes/
-your-theme/
-less/
-main.less
-import.less
-etc.
-style.css <- this is the target file you would compile into
-index.php
-etc.
You can setup the target file to compile into easily. Also, simpLESS will keep the first top comment in the resulting file so that you can put your theme information in it.
I am building a set of Sass stylesheets using Compass.
I also have a minified copy of bootstrap.css that I would like to include in my deployed site. However, I'm not sure where to keep it or what to do with it.
If I rename it to bootstrap.scss then Compass will pick it up and compile it. This takes a few seconds and I really don't need to add to the build time.
If I leave it named as bootstrap.css then it gets ignored.
Ideally there would be a flag, or some way of telling compass to simply copy that file across rather than attempt to compile it. Does that exist?
If your CSS file should not be compiled into your finished CSS file, then it should be placed wherever your compiled CSS files go. However, this is generally not the desired behavior: a vanilla CSS #import generates extra HTTP requests.
There isn't really a down side to having your CSS file compiled by Sass, as the compilation of that file should be cached (unless you're deleting your .sass-cache files?). Sass should only recompile a file if it or something it depends on changes.