Re: [community-group] Proposal: JSON Schema $ref for aliases (breaking change) (#259)

> As a tool author, it is very difficult to reliably tell if a given spec is a single file vs. multi file with remote refs. I don't work with JSON Schema enough but there's enough prior art that I could find easily find a solution within 5 minutes so this looks pretty good.

That’s a great point, and it is a little bit of a papercut for sure—you don’t always know the depth of schemas that refer to other schemas until you try resolving it. But this is also a common problem that has over a decade of prior art and workarounds, too, so it’s not new.

This goes beyond this PR, but in many setups today, people _are_ already using multiple token files for their design system. And they have to manage and describe that “meta” layer that determines how everything fits together. By using JSON pointers (`$ref`s), some people MAY want to just have a single document that describes their entire token structure, and offload maintaining/building that meta layer. This gives them the option to do so.

Of course, there are also more complex usecases with modes, etc., that will be solved by the still-in-progress Resolver proposal (that I have seen a preview, and am a big fan of!). So if we accept JSON pointers, we don’t require people to use multiple documents at all. We just give people better options to organize tokens in a way that works best for them without guiding them toward complexity or a self-contradictory design.

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Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2025 16:30:15 UTC