PodRocket Is Sass dead yet? Miriam Suzanne has thoughts.
Apr 9, 2026
Miriam Suzanne, frontend developer, speaker, and co-founder of Oddbird who teaches CSS internals. She unpacks value resolution and why cascade and inheritance behave the way they do. She explains late type errors from custom properties and how mixins, functions, and Sass fit into modern workflows. She also discusses tooling risks and a wishlist of helpful CSS features.
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The Browser Runs A Hidden Value Resolution Program
- CSS hides a complex value-resolution program that runs for every element and property, which explains many surprising behaviors.
- Miriam Suzanne emphasizes learning the resolution steps (parsing, shorthand expansion, cascade, inheritance, computed validation) to debug effectively.
Cascade Then Inherit When Debugging Styles
- When debugging, remember cascade resolves conflicts first then inheritance fills missing values; they run in that order.
- Miriam Suzanne recommends inspecting cascade winners before blaming inheritance because cascade narrows choices then inheritance fills empties.
Custom Properties Break Early Type Checking
- CSS custom properties remove early type checking which causes invalid-at-computed-value-time errors when the resolved type mismatches the CSS property.
- Miriam explains variables can be set to color or length and only at compute time the browser knows which wins, forcing fallbacks to initial values.