Skip to main content

Be Careful Using SASS @extend, CSS3 Selectors, and IE8

I recently ran into a situation where some of my styles were broken in Internet Explorer 8. What makes this different from all the other times my styles broke in IE8 was that, as far as I could tell, it was correct.

Consider the following code: 

  %highlighted {
    background-color: #ff0;
    color: #333;
  }

  .keyword.is-active {
    @extend %highlighted;

    padding: 10px;
    text-transform: uppercase;
  }

No problem, right?

Then why isn't it working? I wasn't sure, until I looked at the compiled CSS and saw something like this: 

  .some-list:nth-child(2n),
  .is-highlighted,
  .keyword.is-active {
    background-color: #ff0;
    color: #333;
  }

  .keyword.is-active {
    padding: 10px;
    text-transform: uppercase;
  }

Since IE8 doesn't support the css selector nth-child, it ignores the entire rule. Without looking at the final output, there's no way of knowing if this will happen ahead of time.

So what can you do? Well, it's probably best (and easiest) to avoid @extend all together and just use mixins. But if you really want to use @extend, then at least be extremely careful and really understand how SASS @extend works.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CSS line-height Units Explained

In Chris Coyier's recent article, " Fun with line-height! ", he mentions that we often use unitless values for line-height so that it's proportional to the font size. This is only part of the story, and I was reminded of a Stack Overflow question that got me investigating more about how line-height worked with regards to the various CSS units. If you're declaring the line-height on each element, you won't notice any difference. But if you're not crazy and using the first C of CSS (that's 'Cascading', by the way), then the inherited line-height might not work the way you expect. Disclaimer: This is my understanding after doing some research and testing. I may not be completely correct. TL;DR When using a relative unit (em, %), the line-height is calculated based on the font size of the element where the line-height is defined. This line-height is then inherited, unchanged, by each of its descendants. So we end up with a line...
Post a Comment
Read more

Naming Booleans

Naming conventions are one of those little things that can become a big thing when you multiply the scale of the project and/or people involved. I was just looking through some code yesterday, and I saw a variable with a fairly typical boolean name that followed the format isObjectState This felt awkward to me, and I took a moment to consider why this is. In Logic, a boolean is a statement that is either true or false . However, this variable name is written as a yes or no question. It is an easy misconception to equate true with yes and false with no , but though they are similar, they are not exactly the same, and, especially as programmers, we should not treat them as such. When we expand our variables into full sentences, the awkwardness becomes more apparent. Especially when we insert them into control structures. Let’s rename our variable to: is this menu item active? So our control blocks will read: if is this menu item active?, then highlight it. while is this men...
Post a Comment
Read more

Get width and height of a remote image with VB .NET

The Problem I wanted to grab the width and height of an image that was on a remote server. I've done this with PHP, but never in .NET. The Solution I did a little digging and came across this code (slightly modified for my own purposes). Dim request As HttpWebRequest = DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(URL), HttpWebRequest) request.Method = "GET" request.Accept = "image/*" Dim response As HttpWebResponse = DirectCast(request.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse) Dim s As Stream = response.GetResponseStream() Dim bmp As New Bitmap(s) Width = bmp.Width Height = bmp.Height
Post a Comment
Read more