Clifton and Johnny Talk CSS

11:02:37 AM Johnny Goodman: your CPAP.com work was raw CSS right, no less/saas/stylus preprocessor stuff?
11:02:51 AM Clifton Labrum: correct
11:03:11 AM Johnny Goodman: thanks
11:03:25 AM Clifton Labrum: considering a CSS preprocessor?
11:04:20 AM Johnny Goodman: yeah, thinking of switching to RWD and getting our mobile presence going that way. Figure something like Stylus will fit in well there, as it buys is browser compatibility without the need for designers to get stressed out.
11:05:31 AM Clifton Labrum: yep... there are 2 tradeoffs with a preprocessor that have made me reluctant to go there yet:
11:06:52 AM Clifton Labrum: 

1) Every CSS coder on the project must learn the same language (code becomes less portable)

2) CSS gets compiled, so debugging an issue in the browser is harder. You can't just Firebug it and say, "Oh, the selector on line 146 is broken." Instead, you have to trace the rendered style back to your source code. In a nutshell, debugging is often more complex.

11:07:50 AM Johnny Goodman: how big a deal do you think this would be with CPAP.com? You basically were our sole CSS coder. Now we're looking for a designer to help add a blog section and then refactor existing CSS on CPAP.com to go mobile.
11:08:55 AM Clifton Labrum: I don't think a preprocessor will necessarily help you with mobile... you're going to need a flurry of CSS media queries which will need to be fine-tuned by hand anyway
11:09:49 AM Clifton Labrum: If you think it'd be fun and a valuable learning experience, go for it. I know lots of people that are happy with them. I'm just a little skeptical still (especially since native CSS variables just landed in the W3 spec and will hit browsers soon anyway).
11:10:39 AM Johnny Goodman: thanks for the feedback. :)
11:11:08 AM Clifton Labrum: good luck! :)