[pluma]

I feel you. I'm also stuck with IE11 for the time being. No CSS variables, no ES6 symbols. Babel takes the edge off it but there's still plenty we're missing out on for the time being.

Not so long ago, we had to support IE8. Before that, IE6. If you go back a little further IE5 for Mac was the biggest pain point. Before that, Netscape 4 and IE4, which were often mutually incompatible.

There will always be a legacy system many people have to support at any given time. But over time the number of people that has to worry about it will shrink along with its market share. You probably don't see many support tickets about Netscape 4 these days anymore.

Having these standards today means the next generation of legacy browsers will support them when you're stuck with them in the future. That you're not chasing the bleeding edge doesn't mean you don't benefit from these advancements, just that you'll do so with a delay, and likely far less gradually than those privileged enough only to care about the evergreens.

[alleycat]

Use CSSNext if you want css varibles now

[pluma]

Err... no.

CSS custom properties are interesting because they are dynamic. CSSNext just translates them statically, hence why it restricts definitions to `:root`. So the only thing CSSNext gives you over other "variables in CSS" preprocessors is that the syntax looks like actual CSS.

But good luck swapping out colors at runtime without recompiling the generated CSS, which is trivial with "CSS-in-JS" solutions like styled-components or glamorous.

EDIT: Also CSS variables are often advocated with `@apply` replacing preprocessor mixins. But `@apply` is pretty much dead outside faux-css preprocessors: http://www.xanthir.com/b4o00 so you probably shouldn't rely on CSSNext for this unless you understand that even if it looks like CSS what you're writing won't necessarily ever work in a browser.