Totally agreed here. The reason I don't want to move to HAML and Sass is the learning curve required of devs, especially those that aren't necessarily familiar with scripting languages (like visual designers, etc). but do know about HTML and CSS.

This is just a simple enough extension to CSS that is natural, but still giving power to express styles much more concisely.

I think it is important to differentiate between HAML syntax and SASS. Even though both are part of the same package, SASS syntax is actually quite minimal and closely follows CSS syntax, without the extraneous syntactical elements like curly braces etc.

Chris Eppstein, the inventor of SASS has stated elsewhere that one of his primary goals is to make SASS friendly for designers to use, and he claims to have sought feedback from designers as well. See comments here : http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2009/may/20/applying-oop-concepts-...

Hampton Catlin invented Sass. Nathan Weizenbaum is the primary maintainer now, and I'm just a newbie, only around since Sass 2.0.

Everyone seems to give designers an insultingly small credit for their ability to do development. But the concepts behind CSS and Sass are the hard parts (flow, positioning, block, layout, etc), the syntax is easy in comparison. Every designer that I've worked with who knew css took 1 hour to learn sass and fell in love.

Now if they would just write a compiler that fixes everything that's wrong with CSS positioning...

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I like how the examples were all, bar one, longer than the long-winded CSS it was replacing

... looks like a good compromise of SASS though. I might jump!