Understanding Variable Definition in Sass

Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) is a preprocessor scripting language that is interpreted into CSS. In Sass, variables allow you to store reusable values throughout your stylesheet. They can be useful for maintaining colors, fonts, and other values that you want to reuse in your style sheet.

The correct syntax for defining a variable in Sass is to use the dollar sign ($) before the variable name. This is indicated by option "$primary-color: #888;". This syntax creates a variable named primary-color with a value of #888, which you can use anywhere within your stylesheet.

For example:

$primary-color: #888;
body {
  background-color: $primary-color;
}

In this example, the background color of the body element would be set to #888. If you wanted to change the color, all you would need to do is change the value of the $primary-color variable.

It's also important to note that Sass variables are scoped. This means that if you define a variable inside a rule, it can only be accessed within that rule. But if the variable is defined outside of any rule, it can be used anywhere in the stylesheet.

Using variables effectively leads to cleaner, more maintainable code. You should take advantage of Sass's variable scoping to keep variables local to the rules where they're used, to avoid accidentally affecting other parts of your stylesheet.

Remember that while Sass's variable syntax ($variable-name: value;) might look similar to other CSS features like property declarations (property-name: value;), IDs (#id-name), or placeholders (%placeholder-name), each has its own distinct use. Don't mix them up!