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.