Nesting in SASS Tutorial

When you observe the structure of an HTML file, you’ll notice it has a very clear hierarchy:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Page Title</title>
  </head>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

As you can see, HTML has a structure that makes it relatively easy to read.

CSS, on the other hand, lacks this visual structure. This is why it has a tendency to become disorganized quite quickly.

Enter Sass nesting!

Definition

Using nesting, we can nest child selectors inside of the parent selector.

This results in much cleaner and less repetitive code.

Take the following HTML:

<nav class="navbar">
  <ul>
    <li>Home</li>
    <li>Services</li>
    <li>Contact Us</li>
  </ul>
</nav>

Using regular CSS, we would write this like so:

.navbar {
  background-color: red;
  padding: 1rem;
}
.navbar ul {
  list-style: none;
}
.navbar li {
  text-align: center;
  margin: 1rem;
}

There’s a lot of repetition here. Each time we want to style a child of navbar, we must repeat the class name.

With Sass nesting, we can write much cleaner code.

Like so:

.navbar {
  background-color: red;
  padding: 1rem;
  ul {
    list-style: none;
  }
  li {
    text-align: center;
    margin: 1rem;
  }
}

Using indentation, you can now see the ul and li selectors are neatly nested inside the navbar selector.

We have a much less repetitive syntax, which is far easier to read!

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