CSS Variables

If you haven’t heard, variables, those useful little things that let you save values, might be coming to CSS. It’s an idea that’s been thrown around for quite a while, and has currently made it’s way to the w3c editor’s draft. Not surprising considering the push for it.

Variables have been a feature in different CSS preprocessors for a long time now. Being able to save a particular value, use it throughout your style sheets, and then change the value somewhere down the line without having to update it everywhere in your codebase is a huge boon to maintainability and productivity. The benefits of moving such functionality to native CSS so that everyone can make use of it seem pretty clear-cut, but is it really?

Aaron Gustafson has presented an eye-opening article on the subject, CSS Variables Are a Bad Idea. It takes a look at CSS variables from another angle and comes to the conclusion that maybe adding variables to the CSS spec won’t be all it’s chalked up to be. I recommend that anyone thinking about CSS variables give it a read.