CSS pre-processors like Sass and LESS extend CSS in many useful ways, not least by allowing you to use variables in your code either as single values or blocks of multiple property/value pairs, called Mixins. So useful are these that developer Tab Atkins proposed to the W3C that they be adopted into CSS itself, but they were rejected as no suitable use cases were seen.

I think I’ve found a scenario in which, while the use of Mixins aren’t vital, they’re certainly very useful, and it’s because of one of the core principles of coding: DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

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The latest Working Draft of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content module was released last month, and contains some changes to the gradient syntaxes — for what you’d hope would be the last time. The updated syntaxes are a little more logical, but offer the same flexibility.

Firefox 10, which is due for release in a few weeks, will see an implementation of the updated linear-gradient and repeating-linear-gradient functions, so in this article I’ll take a look at those, and write a follow-up when the radial gradient updates are available for use. Update: Here’s the companion article on radial gradients.

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One more post about things I’ve written elsewhere, then I’ll be back to writing original content here again…

Another pair of articles by me got published today; they’re both introduction-level:

Adventures In The Third Dimension, on Smashing Magazine, is a beginners guide to CSS 3D Transforms, explaining the syntax with a few demos; and for Ubelly I wrote The Five-Minute Guide to CSS Animations, which does the same job for CSS Animations.

I’ve an article coming up for .net Magazine soon; it’s called 10 CSS Techniques for 2012, it’ll be the cover article, and I’m very excited about as I wrote it in collaboration with Andreas Johansson, Harry Roberts, Lea Verou, Nicolas Gallagher, and Paul Adam Davis, all of whom do great work.

After that I have two more articles to write, should be tech editing a book on CSS3, then probably starting work on my own second book. 2012 is going to be a very busy year.