Redesign of dlang.org

Tue Apr 22 14:47:49 PDT 2014

On Tuesday, 22 April 2014 at 16:38:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 4/21/14, 11:51 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 21/04/14 23:23, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> I confess getting a bit uncomfortable about adding new 
>>> dependencies at
>>> this point. We depend on dpl-docs already, and the tool was 
>>> difficult to
>>> install and broke from one dmd release to the next. Sönke was 
>>> nice and
>>> proactive about it, but he's an active member of the 
>>> community. If we
>>> find issues with tooling coming from the outside - and we 
>>> will - we're
>>> on our own. It would help if many people in the community are 
>>> fluent
>>> with them.
>>
>> I've used Sass a lot. Although not via node.
>
> Good to know, thanks.
>
>>> Adding a tool right now that has overlapping functionality 
>>> with
>>> ddoc/dpl-docs, and that is relatively unknown within the 
>>> community
>>> sounds like a tall order.
>>
>> Sass doesn't overlap with ddoc.
>
> I'm clearly outta my depth here, basing myself off of giving 
> http://sass-lang.com/guide a couple minutes. From what I can 
> tell here's how ddoc matches up sass features:
>
> Pre-processing: yes
> Variables: yes
> Nesting: no
> Partials, Import: somewhat (by passing several ddoc files to 
> dmd)
> Mixins: yes
> Extend/Inheritance: no
> Operators: no
>
> I'm glad to see a revamp of dlang.org happening. Again if the 
> added tools bring great advantages with them, fine. But we 
> can't add dependencies carelessly and only for minor 
> convenience.
>
> Let me ask Aleksandar again: we already depend on dpl-docs 
> since recently. Is it helping/competing with the new tools you 
> plan to add?
>
>
> Andrei

It's not competing with Sass. Sass would make it easier for me to 
faster write needed styling and also more importantly to have 
style files easy to maintain later (I had worked few times with 
monolithic 3000+ lines long CSS files and can attest that it's 
much easier to work with nice hierarchy of small SCSS files).

I can surely do without Sass and use plain CSS but to keep it 
maintainable I would need to split it to multiple files and would 
need a tool to concat those later to the target CSS (this can be 
done with cat but it's non-standard on windows) and then I would 
need a tool to minify that CSS.

These are simple tools, and they can be written from scratch in D 
(which I would like to do, but then I won't be working on 
redesign while those are done).

If I would use Sass, I would not only get really nice and 
powerful DSL to write styles in but I would get tools to concat 
and minify CSS.

As I've said in message to Dicebot I would not use npm as it 
would be bad marketing, but I would really like to use libsass 
(sassc - the compiler, to be precise, libsass is a library used 
by sassc) which written in C.

If that's too much dependencies I'll have to go with plain CSS 
files.

And I've already decided to use Make instead of gulp (a npm 
packaged build tool for node.js).

The only thing that remains is JavaScript minifyer. I have tried 
almost all of them, Google Closure Compiler, YUICompressor, 
jsmin, UglifyJS and in my experience UgifyJS[1] is definitely the 
best tool for that task (closure compiler can get your slimmer 
files but you must stick to Google's rules of writing and 
annotating your code, which I find too limiting).

The only problem with UglifyJS is that it's a Node.js 
library/tool...
So I don't know what to do about that. Sure, there are online 
versions of both Closure Compiler and UglifyJS but they cannot be 
integrated in build system (well, not without requirement of 
internet connection).

I wonder if DMDScript's parser could be used to write JS minifier 
in D. This is actually something I would really like to look into 
but there is definitely not small amount of work needed to 
develop a tool like that. So it will have to wait, sadly.

So, as I'm not aware of any native good JS minifing tool I'd skip 
that step for now. We can optimize that later (anyway, I'll keep 
JS usage on bare minimum).

The only question yet remaining is if I can depend on sassc[2] or 
not?

[1] https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
[2] https://github.com/hcatlin/sassc