The tools and techniques available to Web developers have improved immensely in the last few years. Our jobs are easier and the Websites we build better because of editors like Atom.io, Sublime Text, and VisualStudio Code, diff tools like Beyond Compare, version control systems like Git (and the de-facto home of open-source development based on it, GitHub), developer-focused browsers like Mozilla’s Developer’s Edition of Firefox and Google’s Canary Edition of Chrome, CSS processors like SASS and PostCSS, build tools like Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack, JavaScript libraries like React.js, AngularJS, and jQuery — I could go on and on. That’s a partial list of my daily toolkit. The full kit is larger and good options exist for every tool I use.
These tools can lost their edge, though, if we’re asked to add a feature to a site that was built five years ago (or a site that was built yesterday using methods from five years ago), and we might face the prospect of having to revert to what feels like sharpened rocks to get the job done. Revising legacy CSS files is where I first notice great tools becoming irrelevant and where the problem has loomed largest for me, and that’s what I’m going to talk about here.
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