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CSS Sass Basics (retired) Speeding up Workflow with Sass Working with Sass Libraries

Posted by Allison Walker
Allison Walker
17,137 Points

Still not sure I understand what a Sass library is...

For Bourbon, especially, I understand that it helps you by including vendor prefixes and auto-completing your font-stack. But I don't understand why it's called a "UI Library" or what else it does or contains. For example, if you create a button, does it have a button style that's created for you? And is that button style complete, with hover and visitor states? I'm just not sure I'm clear. Thanks

1 Answer

Craig Watson
Craig Watson
27,930 Points

Hi Allison :)

A library to me would be best descried as a code snippet resource center.

As you can well imagine there are lots of developers that find super cool ways of utilizing what Sass has to offer.

Like you mentioned there are auto completes and prefixes, but tons more.

Compass is a very popular Sass Library, there are even course here on treehouse about using and working with it.

I think of them as code snippet resource centers because you don't use all of them and basically only use what you need, picking snippets of code to ease your way through the day.

There isn't really much more I could explain without going into separate library's and what they have. This leads me to point at the link above again and suggest having a quick read through the docs and help on there :)

I have even made a set of mixins to prefix flexbox myself here which some library's already have. Take a look through the SCSS section of the pen, if you were using a library you'd only need to know about the @include and there would be some docs to go with it all.

I hope this has helped in some way / cleared a few things up :)

Craig

Allison Walker
Allison Walker
17,137 Points

Well, I'm still a bit confused, to be honest. I think I'll just have to investigate on my own a bit more. I looked at Bourbon, because it seemed less complicated than Compass and might be easier to understand. It sort of made sense, especially when I looked at "Neat".

Thanks for offering your help.