[community-group] Using target platforms to guide the specification (#190)

ilikescience has just created a new issue for https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group:

== Using target platforms to guide the specification ==
In lots of conversations, we tend to use CSS as the default paradigm. #188 and #177 are just a few recent examples, and it's a common topic in the discussion of many definitions. This makes it hard to accomplish the stated goal of "expressing design decisions in a platform-agnostic way."

One way to counter this would be to define a clear list of target platforms, so everyone could familiarize themselves with which features are common to all platforms and which are not.

As inspiration, [browserlist](https://browserslist.dev/) provides a clear/unambiguous way of identifying target browsers (including release/version numbers). This, in combination with data from [caniuse](https://caniuse.com), allows developers to confidently choose which features to support.

A place to start would be something like:

- Web platform/DOM: [cover 95%](https://browserslist.dev/?q=Y292ZXIgOTUl)
    - Some way of specifying which CSS DOM styling features to support
    - Some way of specifying which JS DOM styling features to support
- Native platforms: (is there a browserlist equivalent for native platforms?)
    - Swift >4
    - Kotlin >1.4
    - Objective C (OSX and iOS) > ???
    - Java (Android) > ???
    - React Native > ???

I don't know enough about native platforms to accurately guess which versions of those languages and APIs make sense to cover a desired percentage of install base - maybe we should invite some folks with knowledge of those platforms to weigh in.

Overall, I think this would help guide the conversation and allow us to be more objective when making assessments of format specifications.

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/190 using your GitHub account


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Received on Thursday, 1 December 2022 19:10:20 UTC