Introduction
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a standard styling language used to design web pages, controlling layout, colors, fonts, and more. SCSS (Sassy CSS) is a superset of CSS, part of the Sass preprocessor, offering advanced features like variables, nesting, and mixins that make styling more efficient and maintainable. While CSS is straightforward and widely used, SCSS extends its functionality, which allows for more dynamic and modular code thus making it a popular choice for modern web development.
This article will discuss the difference between CSS and SCSS. Let's start with understanding what CSS and SCSS are and their advantages and disadvantages.
What is CSS?
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a scripting language used to create and design web pages. It is used along with HTML and JavaScript to create websites.
CSS makes it easier for developers to maintain and update a website by separating its presentation from its structure. It allows the developers to create visual rules that define how the web page should look.
CSS is an essential part of modern web design and development. It offers developers powerful tools to change a website's visual appearance. It allows responsive web design and layout techniques that make websites user-friendly and appealing on all devices. CSS consists of selectors, values, and properties that add style to a document's elements. Let us first understand what selectors, values, and properties in CSS are -
Selectors in CSS
Selectors in CSS are used to identify and style the elements on a page. Several types of selectors in CSS fulfill different purposes. For example, class selectors, tag selectors, etc.
We use tag selectors to apply the style to a selected element, whereas class selectors apply styles to a specified group of elements.
Properties in CSS
In this section of the article, Difference Between CSS and SCSS, we will learn about properties in CSS. The properties in CSS are used to control or change a website's color, layout, border, and other visual aspects. Some of the properties used in CSS are categorized and defined as follows -
Text Properties:
These properties are used to change the appearance of text inside an element.
For example - size, font, and color.
Box Properties:
These properties are used to change the size and layout of the element.
For example - height, margin, and width.
Table Properties:
These properties are used to modify the tables' appearance.
For example - Border spacing.
Border Properties:
These properties are used to modify the appearance of the border of an element.
For example - the color of the border.
Background Properties:
These properties are used to modify the background of an element.
For example - the background image or color of the background.
List Properties:
These properties are used to change the appearance of the lists.
For example - the position of the list.
CSS has numerous other properties like the grid, position, display, etc., which are different from each other and are applied to various elements for different purposes.
Values in CSS
Values in CSS are used for specifying the properties of an element. There are several types of values, such as keywords, lengths, colors, URLs, etc.
Lets us understand what each of these values specifies -
Keywords:
The keywords are predefined words that have a specific meaning in CSS.
For example - for the property "color," we use "blue" as a keyword.
Lengths:
These are numerical values that specify the lengths or size of an element.
For example - "5cm."
Colors:
These values are used to specify a color with the help of keywords.
URLs:
The URLs are values that refer to links to external resources, for example, an image.
Apart from these fundamental values, we have additional value types that are advanced and used for complex styling.
For example - animations and transitions.
Let's see the below CSS code -:
body {
background-color: white;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}
h1 {
color: blue;
text-align: center;
}
.container {
width: 80%;
margin: 0 auto;
}
We save the CSS files with the .css file extension.