Chapter 2. Creating Variables and Mixins

A question: how often have you created components such as buttons, where you've used very similar colors multiple times throughout your code? It's a real pain to manually alter. Using a preprocessor such as SASS or Less makes it easier, but with the overhead of a full-sized library.

Can we do it differently? Absolutely; throughout the next few chapters, we'll explore different elements of PostCSS, before pulling it all together to produce a preprocessor application later in the book. We'll begin our journey with a look at using variables and mixins; we'll explore the basics of creating them first, before transitioning to support using PostCSS. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• An overview of creating variables and mixins using existing preprocessors
• Transitioning to using PostCSS equivalents
• Adding mixin support to PostCSS
• Examining the differences between standard preprocessors and PostCSS

Let's get cracking!