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

> > > There are no legitimate downstream consumers yet, this specification is not final. There is still time to make a clean break.
> > 
> > 
> > This isn’t true. There are many, many legitimate downstream consumers, including GitHub, Figma, The Guardian, and more. Pen Pot, Tokens Studio, Styled Dictionary, and Terrazzo are all tools that support the latest draft versions of the spec.
> 
> This is true. The spec is not final, so any current downstream consumers are using it at their own risk. Breaking changes are to be expected, and we cannot (should not!) let the existence of early adopters hobble development of the spec.

The people who adopted DTCG are the people who are contributing here and who are making it possible to have feedback and understand the edge cases that the format will need to support in v1. It's a long-winded journey.

Whilst indeed the spec is not final and breaking changes may happen, to say that the people who are using it, providing feedback, and contributing here are not "legitimate" users feels dismissive of their own efforts.

There are many people using DTCG or wanting to use it who are worried about breaking changes and need some measure of stability to continue using the format in production. The alternative is that they don't use it and that DTCG stalls due to a lack of real-world data. It's not a desirable alternative. 

Non-breaking changes help keep momentum alive and the cost of using DTCG low. There will be plenty of time for a v2 and a v3 where old ways of doing can be replaced by newer, battle-tested ways. I do think _mistakes_ in the spec should be fixed, but here's where I disagree with you:

> We should avoid artificially limiting the robustness of this specification because migration may be difficult for downstream consumers. 

A superior technical system with no users provides less real-world value than a technical system with known flaws and with users. As a token tool developer, I find it acceptable to have both the dot notation and `$ref` for token aliasing, especially if we have token tool libraries that can be used in other codebases for alias resolution, accounting for both syntaxes.

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Received on Monday, 15 September 2025 09:22:29 UTC