The idea is that you're still writing in the CSS language, rather than a DSL. So the distance between what you're writing and what gets compiled is shorter than if you were using a preprocessor. If you ever wanted to rip Rucksack out and go back-to-spec, you'd just run it and grab the output. Your overall structure, logic, and code would look pretty much the same, just with the (expanded) additions from Rucksack. This often isn't the case with preprocessors, especially on big projects where the input often looks little like the output.

As for debugging - you'd do it the same as you would preprocessor features (use sourcemaps, etc.). And with Rucksack it's often often pretty obvious what a given rule outputs, with the notable exceptions of something like responsive type. But then, you've got the same issue in preprocessor mixin libs, so ¯\(°_o)/¯

it does, along with a calc() expression and media queries to constrain how a font-size behaves. Without constraints straight vw units will often result in wildly fluctuating type sizing. For more info on how it all works, check out http://simplaio.github.io/rucksack/docs/#responsive-type

Ooh nice idea with the examples, I'll implement when I get a chance.

And yep, Rucksack is basically just the PostCSS boilerplate we use at Simpla, tidied up a bit and released into the wild. Glad you like it!

What we're doing with Simpla is meant exactly for this kind of thing. Simpla turns content management into a service, with new, editable HTML elements you can use anywhere.

Just did a Show DN on it here.

Thanks David! Just commented on that other discussion too :-)

Yep so just to clarify - your site can be anywhere, local or on a server somewhere. You don't pay for a hosted .com platform or anything like that. We do have paid plans for high-volume, but a good way to think of it is in terms of dev tools as a service, in a similar vein to Adobe Typekit or Firebase, where you just plug in these libraries to your own codebase.

The Simpla library runs on the frontend of your site. The easiest way to achieve this is by hotlinking in a script tag, but you can also self-host the whole library too, either via bower/npm or grabbing the source. It will still need to talk to its data API on the frontend, though, so you'll still need a Simpla acc and an API key.