It seems like there are some good ideas in here but the terminology is utterly alien to me. Not sure if it's me or this is just deeply wrapped in consulting jargon.
The core idea seems to be putting visual parameters in a single place that can be shared across platforms. That way you can tweak the design everywhere without having to edit N different platform-specific implementations.
It's because you can sell "Token-Based UI Architecture" for $1,000 an hour, but you can't sell "CSS variables", so they try to make it sound as complex as possible.
The term “design token” seems to have been invented at Salesforce as part of their design system a decade ago. Apparently the “token” part is the value of a configuration property and at minimum you need a key-value pair defining the property. There is an ecosystem where configuration files are used to exchange data between design tools for standardizing things like colors.
It’s kind of wild that this whole ecosystem evolved without previously coming up much on Hacker News, but that’s just how it goes. Inventing jargon isn’t bad. There is certainly a lot of programming jargon that we inflict on others.
What they are calling "tokens" are just their design elements.
They have abstracted the design elements into their 'tokens' so that they are defined parameters/variables/model-elements that can then be reified at some point before deployment.
This is a fancy way of encompassing a system's design decisions into a model, which can then be used either abstractly or concretely to proliferate them into the entire system, as needed, at the latest possible point the actual values are needed.
It really looks like top-shelf work, but I think their deciding to use the word "token" was an unnecessary mistake.
