Nearly a year after the release of Haml and Sass 3, we’re ready to announce the release of Haml and Sass 3.1. You can install them now:

gem install haml
gem install sass

That’s right, there are two separate gems. last September, Haml and Sass are being split into two separate projects. They can now be installed and used completely separately. This split is long overdue; the details can be read in the original post.

Haml and Sass have, finally, become independent projects.

A Little History

This has been a long time coming. To people looking at the two projects as they are today, it seems deeply strange that they’re bundled. Splitting them has been a common request since version 3 was in development. But it’s worth remembering that they didn’t always seem as different as they do now.

Although Sass 3 (which was released on Monday) introduces a new CSS-extension syntax for Sass, the indented syntax will continue to be fully supported. There continues to be confusion about this, so I’ll repeat: the Sass indented syntax has not been and will never be deprecated.

The reason SCSS exists is to provide people who liked the syntax of CSS with the power offered by Sass. However, we recognize that a large part of the initial popularity of Sass is due to the fact that some people don’t like the syntax of CSS. We want to support those people and so we will continue to support and evolve the syntax they prefer.

To help drive the point home, especially to people who don’t read this blog, I’ve tweaked the Sass homepage a little. Now all the examples are presented in both SCSS and Sass, and there’s a tab interface for picking which format you’d like to see.

Haml and Sass version 3 have been released. You can install them now:

gem install haml

After nine months of development and one more of betas and release candidates, the latest and greatest Haml and Sass versions are finally ready for action.

I haven’t been posting most of the minor RC releases of Haml and Sass to this blog since they only contain bug fixes and usability improvements, which (while important) aren’t very exciting. However, there were fewer bug reports than I anticipated, so I’ve had a little time to work on something extra a couple people have requested: a Less to SCSS converter.

This is being added to sass-convert as part of RC 4, released just now. It is violating the feature freeze, I admit, but since it’s so orthogonal to the rest of the project I don’t think it’ll be a problem. To get it and use it, run:

# Install Sass 3.0.0.rc.4
gem install haml --pre
# Convert all .less files to .scss
sass-convert --from less --to scss --recursive path/to/stylesheets

There are often cases when designing a page when one class should have all the styles of another class, as well as its own specific styles. The most common way of handling this is to use both the more general class and the more specific class in the HTML. For example, suppose we have a design for a normal error and also for a serious error. We might write our markup like so:

<div class="error seriousError">
  Oh no! You've been hacked!
</div>

And our styles like so: