Desassing, unsassing.

#sass #nativecss #css #unsass

Unsassifying is very satisfying.

Remember when you could create a website in a few minutes?

A web development folder 10 years ago:

index.html
styles.css
Setup time = 3mins.
Server load including a few images: ~100–500 KB

A web development folder in 2025:

index.html
plus 16,942 files bought in by NPM
Setup time = 1 day.
Server load including a few images: ~150–250 MB

So much bloat!

So much waste!

I pretended to myself that none of this was happening outside of work. When I say Sass - I actually mean SCSS - did anyone actually use Sass? And in terms of desassing, I’m probably including LESS in the general theme of it all. Anyway, CSS was growing, websites were doing more, and Sass came along to make things easier. For personal projects I skipped NPM for speed and used Koala.exe to compile, and even though Koala.exe stopped being supported about 5 years ago, I carried on. That was until I reluctantly started to use @use. So Sass became a pain. I would like very much to make code as short and as fast as possible, selfishly I would not like to reference everything with the partial it came from. I would not like to be told off about how I should code my stylesheets via Prettier. This was becoming unfun. I think it might be time to unsass!

Sass is now faff.

It’s a revelation! It feels strange not to have to wait for anything to compile. How did I become so conditioned by Sass!? From where I was with Sass, it was pretty easy to make the leap back to native CSS. And probably obvious to most, but here is the lowdown:

Instead of Sass variables, use root variables or ‘Custom Properties’. (not the most catchy name)
Instead of my most favourite simple but probably bad: rgba(#000,.5); for transparencies, use (and I agree this is slightly more convoluted but you get used to it) hsla(var(--hslcolor),.5), so yeah, you do need to convert your faithful HEX to a HSL and store it as a ‘custom property’, but that’s fine, we can do that, it’s 2025, there are websites out there that convert. Maybe even AI could tell you 🫢
If you do use proper full fat Visual Studio, like me, and not VS Code, then you do have to update to Visual Studio 2026, because Microsoft. I’m not sure why their full featured paid for product model is massively lagging behind their free lighter version, and I’m not here to judge, but yeah native CSS support in Visual Studio 2022 is abominably terrible, so don’t even try!
In native CSS, @import feels slightly old fashioned. Not sure why, but it’s like @import url('css.css'); so an index CSS file is cool. The cool weird part is: If you still live in Dickensian times and FTP things up, like me, then you were probably used to FTPing the whole style folder, because it needed the compiled CSS version. But with native CSS you can just upload the single file! Lol, am I writing this as the last person to catch up? Let me know in the comments.

So desassing is cool, it’s super fast, it’s easy, there is no compilation, all the colours are better and dynamic, and this makes creating a dark-mode option super easy. I’m now going to work my way through all my websites, desassing them, but this is my first: