Creating a Maintainable Icon System with Sass

This article explores a robust method for managing icons in a website's CSS, leveraging Sass's capabilities to overcome the limitations of using data URLs for SVG icons. The traditional approach of embedding SVGs as data URLs in CSS offers benefits like reduced HTTP requests and easy size control, but suffers from maintainability issues and color limitations.

This improved approach addresses these drawbacks. The core problem is managing multiple icon variations (e.g., different colors) across various button types (download, external link, caret). Simply embedding SVGs directly leads to repetitive and cumbersome code.

The solution utilizes Sass maps and custom functions to streamline the process. A Sass map stores the SVG markup for each icon, using a placeholder (%%COLOR%%) for color values. A custom str-replace() function (adapted from Kitty Giraudel's work) handles color substitution, while a get-icon() function retrieves and processes icons based on name and desired color. This approach minimizes code duplication and improves maintainability.

The get-icon() function includes error handling: it checks if the requested color is valid and if the icon exists in the map, providing informative warnings in the Sass console if errors occur. This enhances the robustness of the system.

The final CSS output, while still containing the data URLs, is generated by Sass, keeping the source code clean and organized. The article concludes by acknowledging the contributions of other developers whose work inspired this technique, highlighting the collaborative nature of web development. The author also mentions future plans to develop a PostCSS plugin to broaden the accessibility of this method.

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