also add these codepen animations https://codepen.io/ajerez/pen/EaEEOW https://codepen.io/kevin_David_k/pen/eYNeQVY https://codepen.io/tdoughty/pen/bGGZWqg https://codepen.io/amit_sheen/pen/QWGjRKR https://codepen.io/jsulpis/pen/VwBNoEb https://codepen.io/tippyfodder/pen/OyXWpr - with astro components

CSS vs. SASS: Elevating Your Styles

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the backbone of web styling, but as projects grow, maintaining plain CSS can become cumbersome. Enter SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets), a preprocessor that extends CSS with powerful features like variables, nesting, and mixins.

Key Differences

Feature	CSS	SASS (SCSS)
Variables	Native CSS Variables (--var-name)	SASS Variables ($var-name)
Nesting	Newly supported (native nesting)	Deeply supported and widely used
Mixins	Not available (requires repeated code)	@mixin and @include for reusable blocks
Functions	calc(), min(), max(), etc.	Custom functions + built-in color manipulation

1. Variables

SASS variables are compiled away, while CSS variables remain in the DOM, allowing for dynamic changes (like theming).

// SCSS
$primary-color: #3498db;

.btn {
  background: $primary-color;
}

/* CSS */
:root {
  --primary-color: #3498db;
}

.btn {
  background: var(--primary-color);
}

2. Nesting

Nesting in SASS mirrors the HTML structure, making code more readable.

// SCSS
nav {
  ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
  }

  li { display: inline-block; }

  a {
    display: block;
    padding: 6px 12px;
    text-decoration: none;
  }
}

3. Mixins

Mixins allow you to define styles that can be re-used throughout your stylesheet.

@mixin transform($property) {
  -webkit-transform: $property;
  -ms-transform: $property;
  transform: $property;
}

.box { @include transform(rotate(30deg)); }

Conclusion

While modern CSS is evolving rapidly with features like native nesting and variables, SASS still offers a robust set of tools for large-scale application development, particularly with its powerful mixin and function capabilities.