I found the article a little difficult to follow. The intro spoke about the big news, a new file format - with a summary of the benefits. The next paragraph started talking about symbols, with seemingly no precursor to the title "But We Already Have Symbols, Don’t We?"... What?

But should designers sketch?

The actual information hidden in the article is fantastic, but the interpretation of it couldn't be more wrong:

Translating a visual design to CSS/HTML is now a mundane task of the past. The responsibility for all-things-UI is back in the hands of designers.

The frontend has never been lessmundane. Creating HTML/CSS files is not enough anymore, it hasn't been for a long time. This will not bring "control back to designers", no. At best, it will open the door for further processing a sketch project into a prototyping environment or whatever else will come from that. But unless sketch starts to implement Design Features that only CSS can provide, any graphic program will always be inferior.

Here is a list of things that sketch would need for this statement to become remotely true:

• feature queries
• advanced mediaqueries (orientation)
• custom properties (native variables)
• currentcolor as color value
• flexbox
• flexible and relative value units (vh/vw, ex, ch, em, rem)
• CSS Grid Layout (minmax definitions)
• Semantic Elements
• basic dom events
• basic dom states & pseudo elements (:nth-child(n), ::placeholder, ::after, ::before)
• forms and everything associated with it
• ... that also means, today, implementing following advanced concepts that modern day frontend development relies on:
• the Shadow DOM
• scoped style
• custom elements

for all of that, sketch also needed to implement the cascade. You basically would have to make a browser.

And this list is only CSS. Now we are even ignoring the fact, that the frontend layer today is being created and maintained to a majority with JavaScript.

For all of that, you need good, solid, readable, scalable and maintainable, semantic frontend code, just html and css alone. You can't just throw a bit of html and css in there and think that this will be sufficient. And designers now that, which is probably the reason why many of them gain an understanding of the technical nature of the frontend, while the rest stays away from it entirely and delegates that task to the people capable of dealing with that.

And honestly, by the logic behind this sentence:

The translation into components needs thorough thought, but will probably be solved through clever algorithms.

... it would be more realistic to admit, that the discipline actually getting replaced by algorithms is user interface design, not frontend development. Design has become more and more about implementing trends and delegating creative decisions to big data. I am not saying, that this is gonna happen, I don't believe it - but in the premise of the quoted sentence, I tried to draw a picture that seemed more logical.

Designers don't need a tool that bend html & css in a way that make them feel like they are "in control". They need a tool that provides them with an interface that operates based on the concept the web and its technologies runs on. It is not hard to learn enough HTML and CSS to start making web interfaces, or to at least learn what these things are actually capable off.

It really pisses me off, when HTML and CSS are being spoken about or treated as something that limits Designers. The web has capabilities, that print never had. At this very moment, there is not a single program that is able to enable designers to make interfaces that embrace the capabilites of the web platform. You can get something similar, if you combine many programs - and that won't change for quite some time.

That post was, at best, inscrutable.

Version control for designers in now within reach! So exciting! I've asked the maker of Tower (git) for mac to make it compatible. Join discussion here!

This is interesting - I think arguably more for generating sketch files than sketch files generating code.

Imagine a browser plugin which exports the page, layers, objects, fonts and all - to an organised sketch file. Stuff like that's now possible.

Can you open it without re-zipping it?

This strategic move will make designers and frontend engineers skip (the visual aspect of) frontend frameworks like Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation and go from Sketch straight to implementation.

??? surely if the dev team required it to be built using Bootstrap then it will still be built using Bootstrap. Not really sure what this has to do with frontend frameworks or how it negates them.

From Sketch, not as much focus on the file format there... https://medium.com/@sketchapp/b8f1ed22adbe

Seen a few of these types of post. Yet to see a practical example. If it's already in the beta, why has no one produced anything. I want to see this new file format in action.

Thanks indeed for posting, guys.