Re: [community-group] Remove REM/EM from specification? (#218)

It comes down to knowing the reason why tools such as Theo or Style Dictionary exist, the challenge of auto-exporting tokens from Figma via plugins, knowing the core mission of W3C Design Tokens, and an understanding of what a standard is able to accomplish.

- **THEO/STYLE DICTIONARY:** Ability to write a single platform-agnostic JSON file containing all key/value pairs (tokens) that can be transformed into platform-specific variables for engineers to consume. While engineers must manually type a JSON file, they would not need to write CSS, SCSS, TypeScript, CSS in JS, Objective-C, Swift, Android, or Compose. In short, write once and output for multiple platforms. If you support one platform only, the JSON file becomes an extra step and is not required.

- **FIGMA EXPORT OF TOKENS:** The promise of Figma export of tokens is to remove the need for engineers to manually type the JSON files. However, since the output of exported tokens only matched the structure defined in Figma instead of the CTI structure Danny Banks defined for Style Dictionary, programmers would either need to customize Style Dictionary or continue to manually type the JSON files.

- **W3C DESIGN TOKENS MISSION:** "The Design Tokens Community Group's goal is to provide standards upon which products and design tools can rely for sharing stylistic pieces of a design system at scale.". So long as we have standards, we can transform into anything.

- **STANDARDS:** The JSON file (no matter how detailed) cannot be, could never be, the final document that can do the transforms for us. Instead, the file needs to contain sufficient information so we are able to do anything - reliably, confidently, and at scale. Programming still needs to happen. No matter if it's Theo, Style Dictionary or a brand-new-thing, we simply need to know we can rely on something called X will give us the same value unit.

Standardization of Design Tokens is great and solves a lot of problems. But, we need to understand what problems are being solved, why they are being solved, what the benefits are, what the scope of success is, and finally, what is outside of scope. 

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Received on Sunday, 21 May 2023 12:53:19 UTC