🎨 W3C Decided On CSS Nested Syntax

The end of the year for W3C was full of ups and downs when a debate between the organisation and MIT that eventually was resolved just before Christmas thanks to the leadership of both organisations.

Fortunately, it didn’t impact the work on CSS nesting, a new feature that stirred a heated debate not only in the CSS group, but also in the developer community.

On Dec 15, 2022 Jen Simmons announced a survey to choose what variant of CSS nesting developers would like the most.

After ruling out Option 1 and Option 2, 2500 developers had to choose between Option 3, Option 4 and Option 5.

The results of the survey are great! Turns out 86% of developers choose Option 3 that is the one most similar to beloved Sass.

Before we will be able to celebrate having a familiar nesting solution natively in CSS there are some things to consider.

The survey results act as an indicator what the community expects. An input for the W3C team to take the right direction.

While the team takes the user voice seriously, and listens to the online debates as well, it has to refine the final solution. There is a number of reasons to take into account.

While the Sass syntax is nice, it is not possible to translate it 1:1 to CSS.

CSS standard relies on browsers parsing stylesheets that have to understand the new syntax. The team has to take into account whole…