cssnano VS Sass

There are a number of tools available to minify CSS in development or as part of your build pipeline including, but not limited to, cssnano and Vite. If you’re using sass, it’s as straightforward as adding --style=compressed to your sass command. The results you achieve may vary depending on the complexity of your CSS, but you may see numbers similar to this (processed with sass):

Since Tailwind is a PostCSS plugin, we can also add cssnano plugin to compress the bundle.

Minifying your CSS involves removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and reducing property names. This results in smaller file sizes and faster downloads. Use tools like UglifyCSS and CSSNano for this purpose.

For the sake of simplicity, my example setup uses a single-file plugin and puts all styles directly into a single style.css file without using further theme.css or theme.json files, which we might want to use depending on the requirements for customizability. Likewise, SASS / SCSS support can be added if it makes life easier for the developer(s) involved. But as we already use PostCSS to control autoprefixing and cssnano minification, we can also use it to support the latest and even upcoming CSS sytax like native CSS nesting.

The cssnano plugin can minify/compress CSS and make it suitable for production use. Install cssnano plugin using this command:

CSS minification by cssnano

cssnano

cssnano is used to ensure that the final result is as small as possible for a production environment.

There are plenty of free plugins are available to optimize styles, scripts and create source maps for them. Optimize styles Optimize Scripts Create Sourcemaps

SASS(.scss) [ https://sass-lang.com ]

Traditionally CSS lacked features such as variables, nesting, mixins, and functions. This was frustrating for Developers as it often led to CSS quickly becoming complex and cumbersome. In an attempt to make code easier and less repetitive CSS pre-processors were born. You would write CSS in the format the pre-processor understood and, at build time, you'd have some nice CSS. The most common pre-processors these days are Sass, Less, and Stylus. Any examples I give going forward will be about Sass as that's what I'm most familiar with.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and is a scripting language used to style web pages. SCSS stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheet, and is a superset of CSS. You can think of SCSS as the more advanced version of CSS, which comes with several features that CSS does not support, such as the SCSS nested syntax, as shown below.

Scss

In the past, you’d need to rely on pre-processors such as SaSS or Less, but not anymore… Native CSS nesting has landed on all major modern browsers.

Sass is also a css preprocessor. Op is likely confused

sass -> An improvement over CSS. It provides nice features for managing CSS. good for mid-sized or even larger projects.

Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) - A CSS preprocessor that simplifies and enhances your CSS workflow. Website: https://sass-lang.com/

Personally, my preference is Sass: I find that the mixins, partials, and operators are hugely useful when it comes to creating re-usable snippets of code for a design system. And, since it’s “just” a pre-processor and not a framework, it’s not opinionated in a design sense and there’s no default values (colors, spacing values, etc.) that will need to be overwritten.

Preprocessors: SSGs leverage preprocessors to streamline the development process. Preprocessors like SASS for CSS or Babel for JavaScript offer additional features and simplify code development.