Jens, a big advantage of CSS pre-processors is that they can facilitate management of selectors in the manner you describe. Indeed, the advantages you cite are one of the key reasons large teams decide to adopt pre-processors in the first place.
A terrible prejudice I have towards the authoritative experts on this list is that there is a perennial attitude geared towards hand-pruning the style sheets of small & consistent sites, whose any change in content or requirements would duly be enacted through a conscientious reconsideration of every line of code by one author. CSS pre-processors appeal mostly to people who work with very large web projects with many developers of different levels of ability, which must be built to order in limited time, and then set loose in to the wild. As a brief example, SASS's 'extensions' allow the definition of a rule under a given name (for example 'clearfix'), which can be called in by any number of selectors: the compiled CSS then makes sure that all selectors invoking this abstract are condensed into one rule, without the author having to manually insert the selector into that declaration, and without the contrivance of appending a 'clearfix' class in the markup. This in turn works wonders with version control and other paradigms suited to large teams working on the same project. Of course, the output CSS can be under-optimised. You may find that bytes could have been shaved off, and decide that this is worth taking action over. But that's true of anything: pre-processors are definitely not scornful of this attitude; they offer a way to sustematise it. -- Regards, Barney Carroll barney.carr...@gmail.com +44 7429 177278 barneycarroll.com ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
