Over the past few years, CSS has been the first choice of the developers  when it comes to web creation and development. However, the influence of SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) in the market significantly reduced the overall use of CSS. There is an enhanced version of SASS known as the SCSS- deployed widely in place of CSS nowadays. We will discuss the difference between CSS and SCSS in this article. But before making a comparison of  them, let us understand a little  more about the CSS and SCSS.

What is CSS?

CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a type of scripting language that developers use to create various web pages. CSS language also helps a developer to style web pages and make them overall more attractive. It’s a more popular web technology used with JavaScript and HTML, The extension of the CSS is .css.

CSS was proposed by Håkon Wium Lie on 10th October, 1994. It had its first W3C CSS  recommendation (CSS1) issued back in 1996. This language aims at allowing separation of the available content from its presentation, such as layout, colors fonts, used, etc. Due to the separated content and presentation the  serviceability of  content improves. Also, as a result, we get more flexibleness in controlling the specifications of a presentation. CSS concedes multiple web pages to share their formatting. It does so by indicating every associated CSS in a separate file (.css), minimizing  complexity and duplication in the structural context.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Advantages of CSS:

1. Consistency: CSS helps to build a consistent structure that web developers can use to build other pages. Because of this, the web developers’ working efficiency also improves.
2. Ease of Use: Very easy to learn CSS and facilitates the creation of websites. Entire codes are put on one page, meaning it would not involve going through multiple pages to improve or edit the codes.
3. Website Speed: Normally, the code used by a website may be up to two or more pages. But with the  CSS, that’s not the code, and thus the website database remains uncluttered, avoiding any website loading problems.
4. Multiple Browser Support: Most of the browsers support CSS. It is consistent with all other web browsers on the internet.
5. Device Compatibility – CSS changes are device friendly. Since people  are using different types of smart devices to access the internet, there is a need for responsive web design. CSS serves the purpose here by making the web pages more responsive so that people end up showing in the same way on all the devices.
6. Transfer Size: CSS reduces the size of the file transfer. Therefore, the file transfer is very fast.
7. Web-Page crawl: CSS helps to enable SEO for the website. Adding CSS to the web pages, makes it easier for the search engine to locate your page in the search result.

Disadvantages of CSS:

1. Too Many CSS versions: When compared to other versions like HTML or JavaScript, CSS has various versions such as CSS1, CSS2, CSS3, and CSS4.15.
2. Lack of Security:  Since CSS is a system based on open text, it has no built-in security mechanism that will prevent it from being overridden. Anyone can edit the CSS file and modify the links by accessing its read and write operations.
3. Fragmentations: There’s a possibility with the CSS that we can work with one browser, and may not work with other web browsers. Due to this  web developers need to verify compatibility by running the software through various browsers before the website is set live.
4. Complications: With the use of third-party software like Microsoft FrontPage, CSS might become complicated
5. Cross-Browser Issues: Implementing initial CSS changes on a website is quite easy for the developers. Although the changes have been made, if the CSS shows identical alteration effects on all other browsers, the user will have to confirm compatibility. It is simple because CSS operates differently on different browsers.

What is SCSS?

The term SCSS stands for Sassy Cascading Style Sheets. It is basically a more advanced variant of the CSS language. It was proposed by Natalie Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein, and designed by Hampton Catlin. It is also referred to as Sassy CSS due to its advanced features. This language is a preprocessor one, and we have to compile or interrupt it into the CSS language. The extension of the SCSS is .scss.

SCSS is adding several  extra features to the CSS, including nesting, variables, and many more.. All of these extra features make the process of writing the SCSS language quicker and much easier as compared to that of writing the standard language of CSS. The SCSS language may make use of the CSS code and function. The SCSS stays entirely compliant with the syntax of CSS and it also supports the full power of the SASS.

Advantages of SCSS:

1. It helps users to write clean, quick, easy and less CSS code in a program structure.
2. There are fewer codes in it so that we can write CSS quicker.
3. SCSS offers nested so that we can use nested syntax and useful functions, including color manipulation, math functions, and many other functions
4. It consists of variables that help reuse the values throughout the CSS as many times you want.
5. All versions of CSS are compatible with it. So, we can use any of the CSS libraries available..
6. SASS is versatile with feedback, but any good developer would prefer the inline documentation available in SCSS.

Disadvantages of SCSS:

1. Debugging: Pre-processors have a compilation stage that makes the CSS code lines meaningless, when trying to debug the code. But debugging is twice as difficult as programming, making it a huge disadvantage.
2. Understanding: Even if the pre-processors have become widespread, there is a knowledge gap in CSS.
3. Large CSS Files: The source files may be small, but the CSS produced may be large files.
4. Loss of benefits: Using SASS may cause the browser’s built-in element inspector to lose its benefits.

Major Differences between the CSS and SCSS:

Here, we will discuss the main differences between the CSS and SCSS.

1. All of the CSS features are included in SCSS and also other features that are not available in CSS, making it a strong, effective and alternative for developers to use it.
2. To style and design web pages CSS language is used.While SCSS is a particular type of file for SASS, it uses the Ruby language, which assembles the browser’s CSS style sheets.
3. SCSS contains more advanced and updated features.
4. SCSS is more expressive than CSS. SCSS uses very less lines in its code than CSS, which makes loading the code much easier.
5. SCSS promotes proper nesting of rules. Nesting is not assisted by regular CSS. Inside a class, we cannot write another class. It brings a readability issue as the project gets larger, and the layout doesn’t look good.
6. Different style sheets may be used on a single page by some simple CSS line code changes. It has benefits for usability and the ability to customize a webpage to various target devices.
7. We may include the different features to the code in the form of variables, nesting, and selectors with SCSS. In contrast, these features do not exist in the CSS.
8. Indentations are used in SCSS and  that are not present in CSS.
9. SCSS helps us to use the operators to do the math operations. Inside our code, we can do simple calculations for better performance.
10. The knowledge of SCSS helps to customize Bootstrap 5.

Head to Head Comparison between CSS and SCSS:

Summary:

SCSS is a more advanced variant of the CSS language. SCSS is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language. SCSS also added several extra features to the CSS, including nesting, variables, and mixins. This allows you to take more of a programmatic approach to your style sheets.