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The author recommends three projects as having good UI and UX:

SASS: http://sass-lang.com/
Bower: http://bower.io/
Ember: http://emberjs.com/

These projects have two things in common: their websites suck, and I've never heard of them before. (Well, Bower's website is OK).

You could check out something like SASS: allows variables & some other syntax improvements, then compiles into CSS. So you can declare:

$primary-color: #abcdef;
div.header {
    background-color: $primary-color;
}

Hand coding? Yuck.

I create websites in vim and can't imagine not using SASS and either jQuery (for drupal or django sites) or mootools (for joomla based sites)

The only thing worse than handcoding a site would be being forced to use a wysiwyg editor. (are we in a nested div? what will happen when we change a color of a link? lets try and find out, and hope the undo feature works when it does something crazy.)

I wish CSS could support a bit more programmer-centric syntax too, but I've found a great stop-gap with SASS and Compass using the SCSS syntax. It's basically like CSS, but better because it supports variables, mixins (reusable snippets), and other shortcuts for making CSS. The tools themselves might be coded in Ruby, but they generate plain CSS that you can use anywhere.

The centering bits are a problem, but for the others -- use a CSS pre-processor. (Sass, LESS, Scaffold, Compass, Stylus,etc.)

There are ones that are more Ruby-ish, or Python-ish, etc. Some can calculate colors (darken, lighten, blend, etc.), but almost all let you set things to variables so they can be set in one place and used multiple times.

(and none of this is really new -- I know folks that were using ColdFusion, PHP or even Perl to generate their CSS a good decade or so ago ... it's a page of text, and pretty much anything that can generate an HTML page can generate CSS too)

And while they are so slow finalizing the CSS standard, I use SASS and CSS 3.0. SASS is not about adding new features, just some basic common sense in the grammar, allowing for nesting, variable substitution, and another couple of sugary things.

Next step they'll finalize a standard on BASIC from the 80s. :-p

I recommend sass and haml for doing css and html respectively.

http://haml-lang.com/

http://sass-lang.com/

Looks like an automated coding editor, will be nice to use with abbreviated languages like HAML and SASS

• SASS
• LESS
• CleverCSS