“REST for design tokens” is alluring because it’d be codebase-agnostic, but it would be incredibly risky & maintenance-intensive. Design tokens evolve. Builds

“REST for design tokens” is alluring because it’d be codebase-agnostic, but it would be incredibly risky & maintenance-intensive. Design tokens evolve. Builds would break when schemas change—or if you hacked around that you’d forfeit the advantages of typed languages on iOS/Android. Untyped Javascript/CSS would silently break and start to decay the minute changes are made on either side of the server. There are ways to wrangle “single reference point” for design tokens without introducing a network dependency. See the open-source project Diez, a polyglot native transpiler for design tokens. (I’m a project maintainer) https://diez.org https://diez.org