Explicit data types

[TravisSpomer]

The group is leaning toward relaxing some of the restrictions that are in place about how tokens are named. It's a requirement that the pipeline have some way of deterministically knowing what data type a token is—for example, if one token has the value "transparent", it needs to know that it refers to a color and not a font family, so that it produces the correct output. Today, the code in fluentui-shared.js handles this by analyzing the full name of the token, and our system's rules make it straightforward. That's also the way that a base Style Dictionary installation does it (but they have their own naming scheme that we don't use, CTI).

But, if the pipeline were to support other, potentially wildly different, design systems, that would no longer be true, so we'd need an alternate way of specifying that information. I'd recommend just adding a type property right next to value:

"Global": {
  "Color": {
    "Red": { "value": "#ff0000", "type": "color" }
  }
}

It would add a lot of extra information to the JSON, but it's straightforward, and would be simple enough to use. The existing code in fluentui-shared.js would just need to check that type property instead of looking through the full name. The rest of the formatters and export code would need no changes, or at most minimal changes.

[TravisSpomer]

Closing since this currently isn't a requirement for anything.