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.

To install:

gem install haml --pre

The release of RC 1 marks the last leg of the journey to the full release. Features are now frozen; all development effort until version 3 is released will go into bug fixes and other such minor improvements.

To install:

gem install haml --pre

While the second beta release of Haml/Sass 3 doesn’t have as much splashy, exciting stuff as beta 1, it’s got its fair share of new features. As before, almost all of these are in Sass, although there is at least one quite exciting Haml in the pipeline.

It’s done: I’ve released the first beta of Haml/Sass 3: Classy Cassidy. You can install it right now:

gem install haml --pre

This beta has a ton of functionality; more than I could possibly summarize here. I’ve put up sites to host the documentation, though, so feel free to read the Haml changelog and Sass changelog for full account.

I’ve mentioned earlier that I had set for myself a tentative deadline of March 29 for the release of Haml and Sass 3.0. It’s becoming quite clear to me that that’s not going to happen.

It’s possible that I could get all the technical work, such as coding and testing and documentation, done by then. However, I try to give a broad overview of upcoming releases by way of blog posts here, and moreover I try to only introduce new features when they’re ready to use. I’m sure I’d be unable to develop and write at the necessary pace to get a full 3.0 release out the door in a week.

So here’s what I’m thinking right now: I’ll set out some minorly ambitious goals that I’ll try to meet, as well as some more conservative ones that I’ll commit to meeting.

This post has been translated into Belorussian by PC.

One of the most common usability issues people have with Sass is integration with existing tools. In particular, a lot of people (myself included) use Firebug and wish it played nicer with Sass.

In general, since Sass compiles to standard CSS, Firebug can deal with it just fine. One of the nicest features of Firebug when doing CSS work, though, is the ability to tell you where all the styles for an element are defined in your CSS.