The whole industry seems to have agreed on a standard for design tokens. The shift it sets up is still on its way.
Design tokens are not new. The term was coined in 2014, at Salesforce, by Jina Anne and Jon Levine.1 By 2017, Amazon had open-sourced Style Dictionary and the idea had spread well past Salesforce. We have been shipping design tokens for over a decade.
What we never did, in all that time, was agree on a format. Every tool and every team rolled its own shape. There was never one neutral way to write a token down, its value and its meaning, so that any other tool could read it.
Have you heard of DTCG? I hadn't, until recently. It is the Design Tokens Community Group, a W3C effort to finally settle that format.2 The repo is quiet, but that is because the spec reached its first stable version in late 2025, not because anyone walked away. The quiet is a thing being finished, not abandoned.
The list of who is backing it is not quiet at all.
