I admire this guy for not using a preprocessor, but I just couldn’t

I read this article today about someone who doesn’t like using preprocessors (like LESS or SASS) to compile CSS. It’s worth a read, here it is:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201603/why_i_dont_use_css_preprocessors/

I put off learning SASS for a long time, because I find it fiddly. You have to install something, and often have to run commands in a command prompt (something I hate), running gulp or grunt or whatever. But I was converted when I realised PHPStorm did it for you – which is AWESOME.

But now that I do, I feel like I can write styles so much clearer and more effectively, without getting lost in a massive page of WET CSS code. I use the word WET as the opposite of DRY (don’t repeat yourself), as without compilation your CSS can end up with lots of repetition. Especially if you need to target things inside a specific class, you might end up with this:

.main-content p,
.main-content ul {}
.main-content h1 {}
.main-content h2 {}

Look how many times you have to type .main-content! Whereas in SASS you could write:

.main-content {
   p,ul {}
   h1 {}
   h2 {}
}

Isn’t that cleaner?

There’s also loads of advantages – being able to split code into useful components you can paste between projects, rather than one big mass of CSS. Also, keeping colours as variables is amazing. I’ve no idea how I managed before that!

Here’s more articles about the way I like to write styles:

Here’s an article to read about preprocessors: Why your reasons for no-longer using a CSS pre-processor are wrong, and you’re wrong, and you should feel bad.

The taskbar in Windows 7-10 is so much better than on Mac

Having a persistent taskbar where you can launch applications with a click of a mouse button is such a good idea, that all Desktop operating systems seem to have one, which is great!

On Windows it runs the full width of the bottom of the screen, and in Mac (on every version I’ve used at least) it does the same, but aligns to the center. Continue reading The taskbar in Windows 7-10 is so much better than on Mac

Unity has a 8 digit Hex color, and that’s insane!

hex in unity

I noticed something today. Unity has a hex value for colours, which is great – I hate having to remember RGB values between various graphics programs. But Unity’s hex value has 8 digits (see above), which is INSANE! Hex should be 6, it’s always been 6. It’s literally Greek for 6!  Continue reading Unity has a 8 digit Hex color, and that’s insane!

4 examples of CSS being weird

I know many people find CSS quite difficult, and often I see this gif shared as an example of how people work with CSS:

Peter Griffin doing css

But if you’re doing CSS like this, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! CSS isn’t that difficult, but sometimes the chosen syntax does make me WTF. Here’s some examples of that:

Comma inconsistencies

Sometimes you need a comma to differentiate multiple values, like:

transition: color 200ms, background 200s;

But sometimes not:

transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%);

Why isn’t this consistent?!

Slashes in shorthand

Ever seen this?

font: 12px/18px "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;

The first 2 values are shorthand for font-size and line-height. Why they’re separated with a slash though seems unusual as I’ve not seen that used anywhere else.

Apart from you can apparently use it in border-radius (here’s an article explaining that) to separate horizontal and vertical axis, but again – that’s inconsistent to how we do it elsewhere!

Camel Case or hyphen?

CSS has always been hyphenated, for example background-color, text-transform etc, so why did we start adding camelcase like translateY, rotateX? It’s inconsistent!

Edit – Also, overflow-y and translateY – Y so different?

Vertical Percentages are Relative to Container Width, Not Height

I didn’t actually realise this for a long time. It can be really useful once you know what it’s doing. Here’s an article about it. But why can’t I also set a height based on a percentage of the container’s height?

Most popular articles from 2015

I know March seems like an unusual time to do a roundup of last year, as we’re already 2 months into 2016, but I was recently encouraged to do a roundup of all articles on my OngoingWorlds blog, so thought it wasn’t too late to do it for this blog too. So here’s the most viewed articles I wrote in 2015:

  1. I’ve finished a game but too embarrassed to show it anyone because it’s about a giant turd
  2. Exporting a sprite sheet from Flash into Unity animation
  3. So I’m uploading something to the Google Play store
  4. My CSS layout – group by component, not by screen-size
  5. I use BEM – A good clear naming convention
  6. Chrome pulls Unity plugin
  7. My opinions on using or not using Bootstrap
  8. My favourite CSS comment style
  9. How long before we get cool curved desktop screens like this one from Black Mirror?
  10. A vertical-align mixin that changed my life

Also, I wrote this article about what I did in 2015.