You can use a limited subset. cssnext isn't magic, it's purely a source transformation, there's no runtime. It can't handle the dynamic part of css variables.
Yeah, CSSNext here is basically the intersection of CSS variables and Sass variables - you can only use them in property values (like CSS), and you can only declare them at top-level (like Sass).
It's nice if you really want to utilize the current syntax, but it's less powerful than either option it's derived from.
It depends on what browsers you need to support. Based on this data http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables I think it will be quite some time before you see this in sites that need broad browser compatibility. Surely there will be (is?) a shim that will come along.
Pretty sad that in a world with living standards and silent updates, things that improve the state of the Web so vastly for developers still take so long to be widely available. (W3C doesn't even have a CR yet.) Less and Sass are nice, but the resulting CSS is full of repetition, thus hurting performance.
Am I right in assuming that IE won't receive any more feature updates? Many enterprises will stay on Win 7 for a while and enterprises traditionally embrace IE, so thank you, "new" Microsoft, for pushing things forward.
Given that Edge has pretty much completely replaced IE, then yes, it's unlikely IE will receive any more updates. And to make it worse, Microsoft doesn't seem to be updating Edge as much as they were promising, meaning that we could end up in the exact same situation as before.
Edge is an evergreen (ie auto updating) so it's a very good thing that MS is aggressively pushing to kill IE. In the not-so-distant future, IE won't exist.
Safari will likely be the next browser that will be slowest to update, considering its current progress in relation to the latest standards. Even with regular updates they seem to be falling behind.
> aggressively pushing to kill IE. In the not-so-distant future, IE won't exist.
Well, Windows 7 and 8.1 will receive support until 2020 and 2023 respectively. That gives us at least four years of IE 11 being the "new IE 6." (Yes, that is a bit of an overstatement, I remember the horrors of IE 6 quite well. It's still disappointing.)
That's definitely what it's supposed to be, and what Microsoft said they were doing.
But Edge updates seem to be a lot rarer than people expected, and seemingly tied more into Windows updates than any sort of regular release schedule.
If Microsoft want to make it a good browser in the long term, they need to move away from tying updates to Windows ones and just release them when new features have been implemented.
