Recently, CSS has added a lot of new cool features such as custom properties and new functions. While these things can make our lives a lot easier, they can also end up interacting with preprocessors, like Sass, in funny ways.

So this is going to be a post about the issues I’ve encountered, how I go around them, and why I still find Sass necessary these days.

The errors

If you’ve played with the new min() and max() functions, you may have ran into an error message like this when working with different units: “Incompatible units: vh and em.”

the min()/ max() function

This is because Sass has its own**min()**** function, and ignores the CSS **min()** function**. Plus, Sass cannot perform any sort of computation using two values with units that don’t have a fixed relation between them.

For example, cm and in units have a fixed relation between them, so Sass can figure out what’s the result of min(20in, 50cm) and doesn’t throw an error when we try to use it in our code.

The same things goes for other units. Angular units, for example, all have a fixed relation between them: 1turn, 1rad or 1grad always compute to the same deg values. Same goes for 1s which is always 1000ms, 1kHz which is always 1000Hz, 1dppx which is always 96dpi, and 1in which is always 96px. This is why Sass can convert between them and mix them in computations and inside functions such as its own min() function.

But things break when these units don’t have a fixed relation between them (like the earlier case with em and vh units).

And it’s not just different units. Trying to use calc() inside min() also results in an error. If I try something like calc(20em + 7px), the error I get is, “calc(20em + 7px) is not a number for min.”

#sass #css