What we learned from creating PostCSS—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

In 2013, I decided I no longer wanted to manually manage vendor prefixes like -webkit- in CSS. At the time, the common solution was to use Sass mixins, but I wanted something more automatic. The best UI is just having your problem solved without any UI. So, I created Autoprefixer, a tool which reads CSS as input and generates new CSS with vendor prefixes. For that project, I needed a CSS parser and API to work with CSS. And I found Rework by TJ Holawaychuk. The first versions of Autoprefixer were based on Rework (the first name was even rework-vendors). I quickly found that Rework isn’t enough for Autoprefixer. For instance, I wanted to preserve the original whitespace in CSS to be able to use Autoprefixer as a text editor plugin.