Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Where does Google get it's live traffic data from?

Referring to a post that I wrote earlier, Google’s - Live traffic Layer , ever wondered how Google collected this data? I was wondering the other day, how Google received live data to display it on their maps as a layer! I looked up the web and found something very interesting and am sharing the same with you all. As we all know, the traffic layer is available most accurately in several states in USA. Most major metro areas in the US have sensors embedded in their highways. These sensors track real time traffic data. Easy to miss at high speeds (hopefully anyway, traffic permitting), more commonly noticed may be the similar sensors that often exist at many busy intersections that help the traffic lights most efficiently let the most amount of people through. The information from these tracking sensors is reported back to the Department of Transportation (DOT). The DOT uses this data to update some of the digital signs that report traffic conditions in many metro areas. They als...
17 comments
Read more

Playing with the markers and info window bubbles...

    In the last few posts, we have seen some marker examples and some information window examples. Now, lets do something interesting combining these two things. Just writing that "This is an info window" in the information bubble is not very interesting! And I know this...Have gone through the same phase!     So, today we will do something interesting! We will display the latitude- longitude co-ordinates of the point that the user clicks on the map! Doing this is not at all complex! Copy paste the following code and you will see for yourself a map coming to life!     The output of the above code looks as seen in the result section above! If you have any queries regarding the above code please comment on the blog post or feel free to contact me at my mail ID .
3 comments
Read more

Geodesic Polyline

    Today we will have a look at a very interesting polyline example - "The geodesic polyline". Now the first question that will pop is "What is geodesic?". Mathematically, geodesic means the shortest line between two points on a mathematically defined surface, as a straight line on a plain or an arc of a great circle or sphere.     The next question after reading the above definition is clearly, "Why do we need geodesic polylines?" and that would be followed up with "What is this Great Circle?". We will discuss this first, before we move on to the actual example today. The example is very very similar to the normal polyline example, with just a small change.     Having said so, I will now try to explain why we need a geodesic polyline? The shortest distance between two locations on the earth is rarely a straight line as the earth is roughly spherical in nature. So any two points on the earth, even if they are very close lie on a curve a...
5 comments
Read more

Jquery Mobile - Listview with data-inset property

    In the previous post we looked at a basic example of the jQuery Mobile listview. The listview in jQuery Mobile stretches 100% of the width with sharp edges and straight corners. If you wish to have rounded corners for your lists you need to make use of the data-inset="true" property.     Lets take a look at the example below. The lists as seen in the result below have rounded corners as opposed to the straight edges in the example in the previous post, where we had not made use of the data-inset property. When we say that we did not use the data-inset property, we mean that the value of data-inset property is "false". UPDATE: The following example makes use of the next stable version of Jquery Mobile 1.3.1     Hope you have followed the post. Do let me know your feedback on the same and drop your commenets below.
Post a Comment
Read more

Why this difference?

       Several of you must have observed this like I did, that the Google geocoder returns different results on the Google Maps website and Google Maps API v3 for the same address string. To understand why this difference exists, I dug deeper into the web and came up with the following.        The first and foremost place to look for an answer was the Google Maps API FAQ section. The FAQ section did not let me down of course! The FAQ section says: The API geocoder and Google Maps geocoder sometimes use different data sets (depending on the country). The API geocoder occasionally gets updated with new data, so you can expect to see results changing or improving over time.         What I concluded from the above is that, in a lot of cases Google licenses data from other companies like DigitalGlobe, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, GeoEye, Getmapping plc, Tele Atlas, etc. When negotiat...
3 comments
Read more