Deep Research and Development

It's first week of August, and it means it's time for continuation of JavaScript Developer Toolkit series. Last month we talked about Sass and I promised I would elaborate on the topic with Compass . So let's talk about Compass. What is Compass? Compass helps Sass authors write smarter stylesheets and empowers a community of designers and developers to create and share powerful frameworks. Put simply, Compass is a Sass framework designed to make the work of styling the web smooth and efficient. Since it's based on Sass, it's compiled into regular CSS rules and is not required to be installed on production environment. Let's start with installing it on our machine: gem install compass Yes, it's Ruby again and you'll have to live with that. If the command is not recognized, then you probably haven't installed the Ruby on your computer. To do so, please read the  JavaScript Developer Toolkit  article. Compass is made up of three main com...

Remember in our first JavaScript Developer Toolkit article I've told that you would need to install Ruby. Today we'll see why and the reason is Sass . Sass is an extension of CSS3 that helps you creating better stylesheets with less effort. Sass frees you from repetition and gives you tools to be creative. Since you can implement changes much faster, you’ll be able to take your design in a more boldly manner. Your stylesheets will be able to keep pace with changes, all while producing standards-based CSS you can use in any environment. As mentioned already, the Sass processor is written in Ruby. However Ruby environment has to be only installed on the development environment, so it doesn't matter how you write your server side. You only deploy the generated CSS files to production environment. gem install sass Sass offers a lot of features such as variables, nesting, importing, mixins and many more. I'll cover the most important of them, but make sure to read ...