I think the concept that SASS brings to the table (or CSScaffold, for that matter) is one we’ve all had when we play with CSS and think, “Gee, I would be nice if you could use variables and constants here, and if you could duplicate less code.” And then we would think of splitting our CSS up into many little files, since they’re easier to organize by function, only to find that that wasn’t such a hot idea because a browser will have to make a new HTTP connection for each one to download it.

So here’s SASS/CSScaffold adding just those features that CSS was missing. But is it all good news? I’d say on the whole, yes, but here’s a few points:

SASS requires that you compile your stylesheets every time you update them. My typical development cycle is make a little change to CSS (one one monitor) and hit refresh in my browser (other monitor) to see if the change did what I wanted it to do. That would have to change: now I would need to compile my CSS before I hit refresh. Not insurmountable, but it’s one more thing I can and will forgot and then I’ll think, “Hey, now why didn’t that change do anything?” only to find out after some head-scratching that I forgot to compile.

CSScaffold doesn’t seem to have this problem: since it’s written in PHP, it’ll run every time the CSS is requested from the server. I’m sure the authors have built in some sort of caching, so it should be quick enough. That actually sounds handier to me than SASS does, merely because I don’t need to compile. So the question is then, is CSScaffold just as good, better, or worse? If it’s just as good, I’ll go with it instead of SASS!

But is what SASS/CSScaffold do really that new? Like I said at the start of this post, it’s an idea all of us have thought of… and implemented! It’s always been possible to produce CSS through PHP. You can put a link to a PHP file in your page’s header, have it output a text/css header and you’re good to go. That’ll allow you to use variables, like SASS, constants, like SASS, functions and mixins, like SASS, all at zero cost since you had PHP anyway. You’ll basically only need to write the fancy gradient functions that SASS adds.

In order to add caching, you could pull your CSS through Smarty, thus prettifying the syntax a bit (it never feels quite right having PHP produce actual HTML or CSS what with the separation of code and presentation, so using Smarty gives a fuzzy warm feeling of righteousness). You could even write some spiffy new functions for Smarty, thus creating your own Sassy Smarty. So why all the hullabaloo?

Well, for one thing… SASS does more than I ever implemented with a CSS/PHP/Smarty approach, so hats off for that. But I still don’t like the compilation requirement.