Every second counts, the challenges that one encounters while developing a website is second to none, and above all, which cannot be ignored. The fundamental part of web development process CSS is a perfect language to focus on every element of a web page. This style sheet language is compatible with most of the modern web browsers.
The knowledge of platforms and frameworks that one should have adds more to the adversities. It is a common thing that even webmasters sometimes struggle to meet the tight deadlines due to the time they have to dedicate for every minute factors.
One would always feel that CSS is incomplete, and the more you try to achieve, the more effort and time has to be given.
Why CSS is so important, and what are CSS pre-processors?
Short for cascading style sheets, CSS allows defining the HTML elements of multiple web page layouts in one go. But sometimes CSS can reduce the speed of development process due to numerous drawbacks. Now coming to CSS pre-processors, they are nothing but the extensions used for supporting the additional functionalities for a website.
To name a few, one can add variables, mixins, interpolations, functions, operators, which can eventually enhance the performance of a website.
CSS pre-processors, splitting these two terms we have CSS and pre-processors, the latter term is a program that converts one type of data into another. Haml and Sass are the examples of pre-processor languages.
Having stepped into another great year, let us go through the best 5 CSS pre-processors that can reduce the development time for programmers.
Web Development: 5 Best CSS Preprocessors to Know in 2017
- Stylus
- Written in JADE and Node.js languages, the stylus is the one of the most popular dynamic CSS pre-processor. Colons, semicolons, and braces, well you can omit or need not include these while writing the stylus code.
- Even with powerful logical functionalities, this preprocessor is easy to set up and install. Make the CSS more expressive through this dynamic CSS preprocessor as it supports all the features of LESS & SASS.
- Sass
- Short for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, this preprocessor comes with two syntax options, .Sass and .SCSS, where the former one is an original syntax and the latter is a newer one analogous to the native CSS. Due to its larger similarity to the natural CSS, SCSS is being more favored by the developers. Compass, Bourbon, and Susy are some of the popular Sass frameworks that are used for extending the functionalities.
- Any web developer will not find it conflicting while choosing between either of the Sass syntaxes, initially written in Ruby, this pre-processor is also available on node.js.
- Less
- Basically written in Ruby, LESS is known as Less.js after it was ported to JavaScript. Due to the porting, web developers can now easily perform real-time compilation through a standard web browser. If one wants to access all the common features of a CSS preprocessor, then LESS is the best option.
- The fact that makes this preprocessor most favored is that it is a dynamic language, which supports cross-compatibility. Easy to use, this preprocessor offers numerous features that generate CSS. The list of features includes nested rules, variables, functions, mixins, and much more.
- Stylecow
- What makes Stylecow exceptional is that it makes CSS compatible with every browser. That means web developers need not toil with intermediate non-standard code to make the code agreeable with the browsers.
- Easy to use, one need not have knowledge about JavaScript to deal with Stylecow. Also, it is said that Stylecow is easy to extend, I can tell you why? Due to the presence of a powerful API, the developers are allowed to extensively write new plugins.
- CSS-Crush
- A preprocessor that runs on PHP, CSS-Crunch stands apart from the rest due to its Auto prefixing feature. As a web developer, you should know how important the term vendor prefixes is. Through Auto prefixing feature, one can automatically deal with this two-word term.
- Apart from supporting various servers and platforms, this preprocessor is available with common CSS features.
