The thing I don't like about all these ways to "improve" HTML/CSS is that they all seem to assume the rest of the webapp ecosystem doesn't exist. Take SASS's variables and arithmetic, for instance. I agree that CSS desperately needs some way to abstract out common values. But any decent webapp will already be using some sort of template system, and the template system will have some sort of variable. Why not use it a…
You could do CSS in a templating system, sure. First off, you'd want to cache it, but that's a solved problem. And you'd be well served to cook up some subtemplates/helpers/whatever that automated away some of the drudgery. Pretty soon you'd have more ideas on how to keep your CSS more maintainable, your subtemplates would become more general, etc. At this point you have implemented most of Sass/Less/etc but you have…
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#41But it would be the same templating gunk that is used by the rest of your webapp, which most likely has more documentation and thousands more eyeballs looking at the code than Sass. Most people don't roll their own templating systems. They use an established library that's been battle-tested on websites before. These libraries have been around a lot longer than Sass/Haml has.