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SASS - Nesting the CSS

    To begin with SASS we need Ruby to be installed on our machine. To set up Ruby and SASS on your machine refer to the following steps.

    If you’re using OS X, you’ll already have Ruby installed. Windows users can install Ruby via Windows installer, and Linux users can install it via their package manager. Once you have Ruby installed, you can install Sass by running:
gem install sass

    To translate your Sass file into a CSS file, run
sass --watch style.scss:style.css

    Now whenever you change style.scss, Sass will automatically update style.css with the changes. Later on when you have several Sass files, you can also watch an entire directory:
sass --watch stylesheets/sass:stylesheets/compiled

    We don't need to do so many things to get up and running. We just need our good old friend jsFiddle. We will take a look at the various features of SASS today onward. Let's discuss the most basic and an important feature today - Nesting. In all I will be covering the following features in various posts on this blog.

  1. Nesting
  2. Parent References
  3. Variables
  4. Operations and Functions using variables
  5. Interpolation
  6. Mixins (You'll love this!)
  7. Arguments based Mixins (You'll thoroughly enjoy this!)
    Enough of the intro and the overview. Let's get our hands dirty, right? So here we are...Let's start with the nesting feature today.

    Often when writing CSS, you’ll have several selectors that all begin with the same thing. For example, you might have “#navbar ul”, “#navbar li”, and “#navbar li a”. It’s a pain to repeat the beginning over and over again, especially when it gets long. SASS allows you to avoid this by nesting the child selectors within the parent selector.

    Let's take a look at the example that follows to understand the nesting feature in further detail. Before that, let's understand what we are trying to achieve. We want to create what we see in the image below.


    Now that we are clear with what has to be the output,let's dive into the code.


    As you can see in the above fiddle, we have got what we wanted to create. Take a look at the HTML. What we have is a ul-li within a div with id="navbar" and then there is an anchor within the li. I have created the HTML in such a way so that we can come to appreciate the advantages of SASS's nesting feature.

    In the CSS tab, you will find SASS CSS and the commented regular CSS. The uncommented SASS CSS is where you can see that the CSS properties for ul, li and a are all nested within the "navbar"'s properties. If we hadn't used SASS, we would have to written CSS in our regular way which is commented in the example above. The SASS CSS when compiled results in our regular CSS only.

     Hope you have followed the post and now understand the nesting feature of SASS. SASS makes life easier where you have large amount of CSS to write or maintain. Hope you enjoyed the post and you can take a look at the Jquery Mobile and Google Maps API examples that I have posted on the blog. Stay tuned for more SASS examples.

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