Re: [community-group] First-Class Mode Support with `$modes` Array (#348)

> ## The Challenge: Completing PR [#298](https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/pull/298)'s Vision
> ### What PR [#298](https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/pull/298) Introduced
> 
> **Section 6.2 "Root Tokens in Groups"** example:
> 
> {
>   "accent": {
>     "$root": { "$type": "color", "$value": "#dd0000" },
>     "light": { "$type": "color", "$value": "#ff2222" },
>     "dark": { "$type": "color", "$value": "#aa0000" }
>   }
> }
> 
> ### The Remaining Implementation Challenge
> 
> **Critical question:** How does a parser programmatically discover that `light` and `dark` are variants?

Thanks so much for your proposal! But I think this may be a miss on our parts, because I think it’s just a misunderstanding of the example. In this example, `accent.light` and `accent.dark` are **NOT** variants of one another. Those could just as well be named `accent`, `accent.strong`, and `accent.stronger`. The PR does **NOT** introduce any notion of a token containing variants.

The [Resolver proposal](https://www.designtokens.org/TR/2025.10/resolver/) is still the way to handle variants exactly as proposed, including the examples you gave in your proposal. Please just interpret #298 as only removing `.default` suffixes from tokens, and nothing more.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by drwpow
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/348#issuecomment-3509765830 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Monday, 10 November 2025 07:07:19 UTC