CSS Modules vs Sass

Overview

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

CSS Modules

Stacks132

Followers161

Votes2

CSS Modules vs Sass: What are the differences?

Introduction

In website development, both CSS Modules and Sass are popular tools used to enhance the styling of web pages. CSS Modules allows for the creation of local scope for CSS, while Sass is a preprocessor scripting language that extends CSS and provides additional functionalities. Below are the key differences between CSS Modules and Sass.

Naming Conventions: CSS Modules use a unique naming convention where class names are automatically generated, preventing clashes with other elements in the web page. In contrast, Sass does not provide any specific naming convention, allowing developers to use their preferred naming conventions.
Scope: CSS Modules provide local scope for CSS, meaning that classes defined within a component are only applied to that specific component. This encapsulation helps avoid conflicts and ensures that styling is isolated. On the other hand, Sass does not inherently offer local scope, and developers need to manage scoping manually.
Syntax: CSS Modules use standard CSS syntax, making it easy for developers who are already familiar with CSS. It provides a simple way to define stylesheets with class names. In contrast, Sass introduces additional syntax, such as variable declarations, nesting, and mixins, which enhances the capabilities of CSS.
Dependency Management: CSS Modules handle dependencies automatically, with each module taking care of its own dependencies. This reduces the risk of conflicting styles and simplifies the management of stylesheets. Sass, on the other hand, does not handle dependencies automatically, and developers need to manually import and manage dependencies.
Extensibility: Sass offers a broader range of features and functionalities compared to CSS Modules. It provides various programming features like variables, functions, mixins, and inheritance, allowing for code reuse and more advanced styling capabilities. CSS Modules have limited extensibility since they mostly focus on providing local scope.
Compatibility: CSS Modules are supported by most modern browsers without the need for any additional tools or compilation processes. However, Sass requires a compilation step to convert the Sass code into standard CSS before it can be used by the browsers. This extra step might add complexity to the development process and increase build times.

In Summary, CSS Modules and Sass differ in their approach to scoping, naming conventions, syntax, dependency management, extensibility, and compatibility. While CSS Modules provide local scoping and automatic naming conventions, Sass offers a more extensive set of features with additional syntax and requires a compilation step for browser compatibility.

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Advice on Sass, CSS Modules

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 17, 2020

Needs adviceon

Sass

Stylus

PostCSS

Originally, I was going to start using @{Sass}|tool:1171| with Parcel, but then I learned about @{Stylus}|tool:1172|, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and @{PostCSS}|tool:3339|, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?

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Detailed Comparison

Sass	CSS Modules
Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.	It is a CSS file in which all class names and animation names are scoped locally by default. The key words here are scoped locally. With this, your CSS class names become similar to local variables in JavaScript. It goes into the compiler, and CSS comes out the other side.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 15.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 44.8K	Stacks 132
Followers 32.2K	Followers 161
Votes 3.0K	Votes 2
Pros & Cons
Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled	Pros 2 Static rather than compiled at runtime

What are some alternatives to Sass, CSS Modules?

Less

Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable.

Stylus

Stylus is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.

PostCSS

PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JS plugins. These plugins can support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.

Bourbon

Bourbon is a library of pure sass mixins that are designed to be simple and easy to use. No configuration required. The mixins aim to be as vanilla as possible, meaning they should be as close to the original CSS syntax as possible.

Compass

The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions.

astroturf

It lets you write CSS in your JavaScript files without adding any runtime layer, and with your existing CSS processing pipeline.

PreCSS

It combines Sass-like syntactical sugar — like variables, conditionals, and iterators — with emerging CSS features — like logical and custom properties, media query ranges, and image sets.

Animate.css

It is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness.

Autoprefixer

It is a CSS post processor. It combs through compiled CSS files to add or remove vendor prefixes like -webkit and -moz after checking the code.

css-loader

The css-loader interprets @import and url() like import/require() and will resolve them.

Related Comparisons

CSS Modules vs Sass: What are the differences?

Introduction

Naming Conventions: CSS Modules use a unique naming convention where class names are automatically generated, preventing clashes with other elements in the web page. In contrast, Sass does not provide any specific naming convention, allowing developers to use their preferred naming conventions.
Scope: CSS Modules provide local scope for CSS, meaning that classes defined within a component are only applied to that specific component. This encapsulation helps avoid conflicts and ensures that styling is isolated. On the other hand, Sass does not inherently offer local scope, and developers need to manage scoping manually.
Syntax: CSS Modules use standard CSS syntax, making it easy for developers who are already familiar with CSS. It provides a simple way to define stylesheets with class names. In contrast, Sass introduces additional syntax, such as variable declarations, nesting, and mixins, which enhances the capabilities of CSS.
Dependency Management: CSS Modules handle dependencies automatically, with each module taking care of its own dependencies. This reduces the risk of conflicting styles and simplifies the management of stylesheets. Sass, on the other hand, does not handle dependencies automatically, and developers need to manually import and manage dependencies.
Extensibility: Sass offers a broader range of features and functionalities compared to CSS Modules. It provides various programming features like variables, functions, mixins, and inheritance, allowing for code reuse and more advanced styling capabilities. CSS Modules have limited extensibility since they mostly focus on providing local scope.
Compatibility: CSS Modules are supported by most modern browsers without the need for any additional tools or compilation processes. However, Sass requires a compilation step to convert the Sass code into standard CSS before it can be used by the browsers. This extra step might add complexity to the development process and increase build times.

CSS Modules vs Sass

Overview