Sass (style sheet language)

Sass was initially designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Natalie Weizenbaum. == Major implementations ==

SassScript was implemented in multiple languages, the noteworthy implementations are: • The official open-source Dart implementation. • The official "sass-embedded" node module which is a JavaScript wrapper around the native Dart executable. • The original open-source Ruby implementation created in 2006, since deprecated due to the lack of maintainers and reached End-of-Life in March 2019. • libSass, the official open-source C++ implementation, (deprecated in October 2020 then reached) end-of-life in October 2025. • The (deprecated then) end-of-life in July 2024 "node-sass" node module on npm, based on the end-of-life (by now) libSass. • JSass, an unofficial Java implementation, based on the end-of-life (by now) libSass. • phamlp, an unofficial Sass/SCSS implementation in PHP. • Firebug, a Firefox XUL ("legacy") extension for web development. It has been since (deprecated and then) discontinued in favor of developer tools integrated into Firefox itself. It stopped working since Firefox 57 dropped support for XUL extensions. == Features ==

Variables Sass allows variables to be defined. Variables begin with a dollar sign ($). Variable assignment is done with a colon (:). During translation, the values of the variables are inserted into the output CSS document. Nesting CSS does support logical nesting, but the code blocks themselves are not nested. Sass allows the nested code to be inserted within each other. More complicated types of nesting including namespace nesting and parent references are discussed in the Sass documentation. Loops Sass allows for iterating over variables using , and , which can be used to apply different styles to elements with similar classes or ids. Arguments Mixins also support arguments. In combination Selector inheritance While CSS3 supports the Document Object Model (DOM) hierarchy, it does not allow selector inheritance. In Sass, inheritance is achieved by inserting a line inside of a code block that uses the @extend keyword and references another selector. The extended selector's attributes are applied to the calling selector. Sass supports multiple inheritance. == libSass ==

At the 2012 HTML5 Developer Conference, Hampton Catlin, the creator of Sass, announced version 1.0 of libSass, an open source C++ implementation of Sass developed by Catlin, Aaron Leung, and the engineering team at Moovweb. According to Catlin, libSass can be "drop[ped] into anything and it will have Sass in it...You could drop it right into Firefox today and build Firefox and it will compile in there. We wrote our own parser from scratch to make sure that would be possible." The design goals of libSass are: • Performance – Developers have reported 10x speed up increases over the Ruby implementation of Sass. • Easier integration – libSass makes it easier to integrate Sass into more software. Before libSass, tightly integrating Sass into a language or software product required bundling the entire Ruby interpreter. By contrast, libSass is a statically linkable library with zero external dependencies and C-like interface, making it easy to wrap Sass directly into other programming languages and tools. For example, open source libSass bindings now exist for Node, Go, and Ruby. == IDE integration ==