= The Forgotten Child: Powerful CSS with Rails by Geoffrey Grosenbach

Working title:
Deplyoing scalable thread-safe rails-generated css in jruby, with agiity (please mention on Twitter)

Like to start with a little humor:
- When americans think of Berlin they think of: "Ich bin ein Berliner"
- Was meaningful to Germans
- "Ich bin ein Chunky Bacon"

The internet scale of humor:
- heh
- hah
- lol
- LOL
- rofl lmao

Jokes about Recursion is always funny for us developers
But CSS is NOT funny

Why not:
CSS = Type.new "text/css", :css

There is stylesheets directory, but it is up to you to put together a stylesheet
For many people it works, and that's a good way to do it

There are still benefits in generating CSS dynamically

== Why generate CSS?

 * Repetition: The same color is written multiple places in the stylesheet
 * If you are a programmer wanting to write some css, you are stuck with these things
 * Have to report e.g. <li> element three times in the stylesheet
 * Information about the width is usually in the stylesheet, and only there (pnn.com example)


== Stylesheet elements

 * Colors
 * Layouts
 * Typography
 * Compatibility
 * Devices

Each one of these can be split out, and be dynamically generated, and the rest can just be static

== How?

=== ERB

Already built into Rails:
 * Generate stylesheets controller
 * Add a Mimetype of type "text/css"
 * In controller:

caches_page :application

def application
	respond_to do |format|
		format.css
	end
end

===== Advantages
 * DB Driven
 * Familiar
 * No plugins needed

=== HAML

HAML: No angle brackets! 

=== SASS

SASS is meant to be a very descriptive, css-targeted template
- Very nice way to write CSS

/public/stylesheets/sass/[...].sass
- Will generate css files in the parent directory

A graphic designer who is familiar with CSS can easily use SASS - even based on an existing CSS file

You can set some values:
!pink = #ff43a7

#sidebar
	color= !pink
	
You can actually do math:
!darker_pink = !pink - #333333

@import colors.sass
- Reuse of colors across various sass (css) files

dl.stat
	clear: both
	margin:
		left:		2em
		bottom:	1em
		
==== Features
 * Not DB-driven
 * Just an effiecent way to write CSS syntax
 * In development mode it only reload with controllers
 * Benefit: Very CSS-like

=== merb

Can also utilize the Sass Engine