My stylesheets have large amounts of styles declared, often with a lot of repeated values. I read about variables in CSS to solve that problem.
I tried to use them, but it is not working:
element {
--main-bg-color: brown;
}
body {
background-color: var --main-bg-color;
}
What am I doing wrong?
You did everything right, just keep the variables in (put variable here)
element {
--main-bg-color: brown;
}
body {
background-color: var(--main-bg-color);
}
var() notation works like a method
var(<custom-property-name>)
might consider putting your variables in a :root selector...
:root {
--main-bg-color: brown;
}
/* The rest of the CSS file */
body {
background-color: var(--main-bg-color);
}
:root is similar to global scope, but the element itself (ie body { --myvar: ... }) or ancestor elements (ie html { --myvar: ... }) can also be used to define variables
Refer to MDN reference page. A brief, to use custom variables you need to place them inside :root selector:
:root {
--main-bg-color: brown
}
In order to use it in another selector yo use var():
body {
background-color: var(--main-bg-color)
}
You need to add var(--my-variable) when using the variables.
But that's not something you should use CSS custom properties (variables) for.
Bear in mind some browser can't understand CSS variables, most noticeably IE. So using any pre-processor instead will be better for compatibility, as they are compiled to regular CSS values. Either SASS, LESS, POSTCSS... whatever floats your boat.
CSS custom properties are much more powerful than pre-processor ones, as they can be changed at runtime with javascript and be used in all sorts of awesome ways, but when you're using them as regular variables, pre-processor variables are always better for compatibility.
If you want to declare them globally, I would recommend to use it in:
* { --var : #colorName; }.
This has actually helped me in Angular application.
For me, the problem was that @charset "UTF-8"; was not the very first characters in the css file, and this messed up the :root{--my-variable: large }.
