Within CSS you now can do so many things that were the subject for using a pre- and postprocessor like Sass, Less or PostCSS. The latter is still useful in many cases today but the former are less and less important for these reasons:
- People use some sort of CSS-in-JavaScript anyways and what they write (not produce!) is not CSS anymore 😏
- Nesting is natively available in CSS ✅
- BEM and similar naming approaches are getting outdated because of new CSS features such as Layers and native Nesting. 😊
- Browsers have evolved so much that we have a great baseline and can use most of the things across most browsers. And if not, usually we can fallback gracefully within CSS. ❤️
I’ve been using only PostCSS for years and it’s more than enough. Usually to optimise file size or to produce fallbacks automatically for older browsers. The benefit is that I could almost always just publish the bare source files as well and the website works. And I could switch tools easily at any time.
Cynism points:
- People using Tailwind and it does everything for them, except it’s not and they struggle because they don’t know how to properly use CSS. (Nothing against Tailwind here, I like it, but there are too many people using it without knowing what they do) 🙀
- People using MUI framework (also: it has its purpose!) and don’t even know the basics of CSS and are amazed by a developer who can create a three-colour-step gradient just within CSS without using an image for this in code.