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CSS Preprocessor

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about the CSS preprocessors – overview of the CSS preprocessors, popular preprocessors and their advantages.
Submitted by Anjali Singh, on January 23, 2020

Trivia:

While developing a website or web page, we tend to use make us of CSS or as we better know it as Cascading Style Sheet. Well, we all know what this CSS is used for, we use it to style our various elements of website or web page. The use of CSS is indispensable for any developer while developing a website or web page. Although we can style our web page in the HTML code itself, CSS keeps our code and work much more organized. Therefore, it is a good practice to make use of CSS. CSS provides you with many features and properties that can be applied to your website or web page's elements. From coloring to change the font style, to increase the size of text and many more. The main advantage of using CSS is that you can use one CSS stylesheet for many main HTML pages, it can be done by invoking the stylesheet into your main HTML code.

Definition:

We all are familiar with the term preprocessor, aren't we? Well, even if you are not you might want to read ahead to get a better idea of the preprocessor.

A CSS preprocessor is nothing but a program that helps you in generating CSS from the preprocessor's unique syntax. There are numerous CSS out there to choose from, however, these CSS preprocessors will add features that might not be found in the pure CSS. Some examples of such features are nesting, mixing, inheritance and much more. The sole purpose of these additional features is that they make the structure of the CSS much more comprehensive and easy to maintain. Therefore, many developers tend to choose from various amounts of CSS preprocessors available.

Popular preprocessors:

However, if you are planning to do the same, you must have a CSS compiler installed on your web browser.

For your convenience, some of the popular CSS preprocessors are mentioned below,

• .Sass
• .LESS
• .Stylus
• .PostCSS

Advantages:

Some of the advantages of using a CSS preprocessor,

• You can increase your productivity with the help of a CSS preprocessor.
• The number of lines of code will reduce if you are using a CSS preprocessor.
• A more comprehensive and maintainable CSS code can be generated with the help of a preprocessor.
• The code written using a CSS preprocessor is extensible and reusable.
• Although the syntax is a bit different but corresponds to basic CSS aspects.

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