I used LESS a lot. These days I decided to try SASS and to be honest it's a better choice for CSS preprocessor. It just gives me more functionalities and better control on my code. There are few instruments for architecting your CSS logic - @mixin, @extend and placeholders. However there are differences between them and specific use cases.

That's first of (I hope) many posts with such an idea. Problems solved with pure CSS. No JavaScript.

By definition :before and :after are CSS pseudo elements. You can use them to insert something before or after the content of an element. There are some great articles giving the basics, but I wanted to write down a blog post for the real use cases. Or, at least, to show what I'm using them for.

As you may know I just updated my web site. There are five columns which nicely slide up and down on a lower resolution. In other words, accordion-like navigation. Initially I made this effect with JavaScript. But there was a bug and I decided to use pure CSS. I wanted to define everything in CSS classes which to add or remove. The idea wasn't bad except the fact that every column contains dynamic content and I wasn't able to set the exact height when the column is slided down.

I'm absolutely sure that you've already met this problem. You know, these nice rounded buttons that are provided by the designer. They are really cool, but sometimes the label of the button is so long that you have to resize/scale the image. ActionScript3 provides simple way to solve this issue.

Papervision3D is a perfect tool for the purpose. As you will see such a task needs only few lines of code. To make the example a little bit more interesting we will add additional code to control the rotation of the globe by the mouse.