Sass Nested Rules and Properties

Sass Nested Rules

Sass lets you nest CSS selectors in the same way as HTML.

Look at an example of some Sass code for a site's navigation:

Example

SCSS Syntax:

nav {
ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
}
li {
    display: inline-block;
}
a {
    display: block;
    padding: 6px 12px;
    text-decoration: none;
}
}

Run Example »

Notice that in Sass, the ul, li, and a selectors are nested inside the nav selector.

While in CSS, the rules are defined one by one (not nested):

CSS Syntax:

nav ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
}
nav li {
display: inline-block;
}
nav a {
display: block;
padding: 6px 12px;
text-decoration: none;
}

Because you can nest properties in Sass, it is cleaner and easier to read than standard CSS.

Sass Nested Properties

Many CSS properties have the same prefix, like font-family, font-size and font-weight or text-align, text-transform and text-overflow.

With Sass you can write them as nested properties:

Example

SCSS Syntax:

font: {
family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
size: 18px;
weight: bold;
}

text: {
align: center;
transform: lowercase;
overflow: hidden;
}

The Sass transpiler will convert the above to normal CSS:

CSS Output:

font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: bold;

text-align: center;
text-transform: lowercase;
text-overflow: hidden;

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