Should compression be an active feature of grass?

[LeoDog896]

Parcel has an amazing library called lightningcss which offers better performance than both CSSNano and esbuild's css minifier. Given that there is already a minification tool for CSS, should grass also offer minification services that make grass's minification features obsolete. Given this, should grass still actively support minification?

[connorskees]

Yes, this project should and will always support minification. If users want particular a minification pass that grass does not do, they should either use a tool that implements that pass as a post-processing step or open a feature request.

It doesn't make sense to remove minification from this library because there exist other tools that do CSS compression. Emitting compressed output is extremely cheap for us and should satisfy the vast majority of use cases.

[LeoDog896]

Actually, I think this came more from a place of confusion - I originally assumed that dart-sass doesn't have any minification support, but dart-sass does have a minification feature on their CLI. However, the code that internally implements minification inside grass already covers some small optimization cases (like removing trailing zeros and optimizing colors).

Instead of removing the minification feature entirely, should this be handed off to lightningcss to offer compatibility with node-sass's minification feature, instead of creating an in-house solution for minification that may get more and more features over time?

(I do very doubt the fact that trailing zeros and color optimization will be the only things that will be added to the minification system)

[connorskees]

Ah. Yes, the other issue is that grass must implement dart-sass compatible compressed output to comply with the official spec tests. Sass as a language is limited in what optimizations it can do, since it explicitly does not know about specific properties, so it can never e.g. emit shorthand syntax.

We can't by-default use lightningcss to compress output, but a 3rd-party tool could combine the two if it chose to do so.

Sass does a lot more than just removing trailing zeroes and optimizing colors. If there are optimizations you think are missing, you should open a feature request either here or on the official spec repo.

[LeoDog896]

Yes, the other issue is that grass must implement dart-sass compatible compressed output to comply with the official spec tests.

That makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying!