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• Dropping Support For Old Ruby Versions

  Posted 29 February 2016 by Natalie Weizenbaum

  As of version 3.5, Ruby Sass will drop support for Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.3. We will continue to support Ruby 2.0.0 and higher.

  Ruby 1.8.7 was retired by the Ruby maintainers in June 2013, and Ruby 1.9.3 was retired in February 2015. Despite that, we continued to maintain support for older versions because Ruby 1.8.7 was installed by default on Mac OS X through Mountain Lion (which was released in July 2012).

  There are many users of Sass who aren’t independently users of Ruby. We wanted to minimize the amount of work these users need to do to use Sass, which means letting it run on their machine without also requiring them to install a new language.

  That decision wasn’t without costs, though. Most seriously, recent versions of the listen package didn’t support older Ruby versions, and older versions of RubyGems weren’t clever enough to avoid downloading them on incompatible Ruby versions. To work around this, we bundled an older version of listen with Sass and used…

• Cleaning Up Interpolation

  Posted 9 December 2015 by Natalie Weizenbaum

  Interpolation—the ability to add variables and other snippets using #{...}—is one of the handiest all-purpose features of Sass. You can use it just about everywhere you might need to inject a variable, a function call, or some other expression. In most of those places it just plops the value into the surrounding text. It’s straightforward, easy to understand, and useful, which is exactly what we want from a feature.

  Unfortunately, that’s only true in most places. For complicated historical reasons, there’s one place where interpolation goes a little bit bananas: inside an expression but outside quotes. Most of the time, it makes sense; if you write display: -#{$prefix}-box, you’ll get what you expect. But if any operators like + are used next to the interpolation, you start to get weird output. For example, $name + #{$counter + 1} might return an unquoted string containing the text name + 3.

  This is really weird behavior. Why does + behave differently here than it does everywhere else? Why…

• Sass 3.4 is Released

  Posted 19 August 2014 by Natalie Weizenbaum

  We’ve been trying to increase the pace of Sass releases, and it looks like we’ve succeeded. A mere five months after the release of Sass 3.3, we’re announcing the release of Sass 3.4.0, codename Selective Steve. Faster releases mean fewer major features per release, so there are only two big new things to talk about (although there are plenty of little improvements you can read about in the changelog). As the version name suggests, both of these features have to do with selectors.

  Using & in SassScriptUsing & in SassScript permalink

  “SassScript” is what we call the mini-language Sass uses for variables, property values, and so forth. It’s mostly just CSS values, but it also supports custom functions, arithmetic, and so forth. In Sass 3.4, we added support for something new: the parent selector, &.

  Most Sass users will probably recognize & from its previous appearances in selectors around the world, where it’s used to explicitly refer to the parent selector. For example, in .parent {...

• Sass 3.3 is Released

  Posted 8 March 2014 by Natalie Weizenbaum

  After ironing out a bunch of bugs in numerous release candidates, we’re finally ready to release Sass 3.3.0, codename Maptastic Maple, for public consumption. This release has a lot of exciting new features that you can read about in full in the changelog, but there are three that I want to draw your attention to in particular.

  Maps in SassScriptMaps in SassScript permalink

  As language designers, most of our job is to listen to feedback from users and act upon it. This is tricker than it sounds: users are very good at knowing the precise thing that they want to accomplish, but they tend not to have a sense of how that fits into the big picture. So we take a large volume of user requests, try to distill the core needs that aren’t being met, and see if we can come up with features that hit as many of those as possible as simply as possible.

  SassScript maps are a great example of this. We had a…

• A Change in Plans for Sass 3.3

  Posted 20 December 2013 by Natalie Weizenbaum

  This was originally published as a gist.

  Sass 3.3 is coming soon, and along with it several major new features. It supports source maps, SassScript maps, and the use of & in SassScript. In preparation for its release, we’ve put out a couple of release candidates to be sure that everything was set and ready to go. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

  Release candidates often turn up small bugs and inconsistencies in new features, but it’s rare that they find anything truly damning. In this case, though, several users noticed an issue with using & in SassScript that rendered a sizable chunk of our plan for that section of 3.3 unworkable. It’s not a fatal issue, and we think we have a good plan for dealing with it (I’ll get to that in a bit), but it is a problem.

  The BackgroundThe Background permalink

  To understand what’s wrong, first you need to understand the reason we decided to make & accessible to SassScript in the first place. One thing users…

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