CSS vs SCSS

CSS is one of the foundations of web development. It has been there for years. But ever since SCSS has been developed, CSS has got a tough competition from it. So what is it that makes SCSS better than CSS? Read more to know the differences between both of them.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.

CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content.

The basic idea behind CSS is to separate the structure of a document from the presentation of the document. HTML is meant for structure. It was never intended for anything else. All those attributes you add to style your pages were added later as the viewing public demanded it. All those additions though make HTML clumsy and work against its main purpose of structuring a document. HTML is there to let a browser know that this block of text is a paragraph and that block of text is a heading for this paragraph.

Advantages of CSS

1. Easier to maintain and update
2. Greater consistency in design
3. More formatting options
4. Lightweight code
5. Faster download times
6. Search engine optimization benefits
7. Ease of presenting different styles to different viewers
8. Greater accessibility

Disadvantages of CSS

1. It ould be easily overridden
2. It takes more time to download a CSS file than an HTML file.
3. It becomes complicated because of different versions.

SCSS

SASS or SCSS (short for syntactically awesome style sheets) is a style sheet language initially designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Natalie Weizenbaum. After its initial versions, Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein have continued to extend Sass SassScript, a scripting language used in Sass files.

Sass consists of two syntaxes. The original syntax, called "the indented syntax," uses a syntax similar to Haml. It uses indentation to separate code blocks and newline characters to separate rules. The newer syntax, "SCSS" (Sassy CSS), uses block formatting like that of CSS. It uses braces to denote code blocks and semicolons to separate rules within a block. The indented syntax and SCSS files are traditionally given the extensions .sass and .scss, respectively.

Advantages of SCSS

1. It contains fewer codes so you can write CSS quicker.
2. It is more stable, powerful, and elegant because it is an extension of CSS, making it easy for designers and developers to work more efficiently and quickly.
3. It is compatible with all versions of CSS. So, you can use any available CSS libraries.
4. It provides nesting so you can use nested syntax and useful functions like color manipulation, math functions, and other values.

Disadvantages of SCSS

1. The developer must have enough time to learn new features present in this preprocessor before using it.
2. Using SCSS may cause losing benefits of the browser's built-in element inspector.
3. Debugging becomes harder in case of SCSS
4. It can produce very large CSS files.

Now that the brief description of both CSS and SCSS is done, we will discuss the comparison between CSS and SCSS

1. SCSS contains all the features of CSS and contains more features that are not present in CSS which makes it a good choice for developers to use it.
2. SCSS is full of advanced features.
3. SCSS is more expressive than CSS
4. It encourages proper nesting of rules.

Thanks for reading the article.