Roadmap

The release that declares the component API stable: a version you can build on, where a breaking change waits for the next major and anything deprecated stays available through it. It is the one release on this page whose meaning is a bar rather than a subject, so the bar is stated — three things are true before the number is used.

• Every component is marked stable. A component still marked experimental can change its API in a minor release, which is the opposite of what this version promises, so the ones that remain either settle or come out of the release.
• Every component carries its accessibility record — what has been reviewed, and what a consumer still has to do themselves. A component library cannot hand you an accessible page on its own, and the record is where that line is drawn per component rather than claimed once for all of them.
• The Inspiration library has shipped: a prescriptive set of patterns, screens and flows, composed from the components that already ship. The component reference tells you what <cs-input> does; Inspiration tells you what a sign-in screen built out of Cornerstone parts should look like, and publishes the reasoning next to it so you can tell when your case is genuinely different. It adds no new behaviour — every entry is components and utilities you already have.

8 open questions

Cornerstone in a WordPress theme. What stands in the way is a safe path from the CSS the token build emits to theme.json, which is where a WordPress theme is expected to keep its palette, its type scale and its spacing. WordPress reads those values from that file rather than from a stylesheet, and the token build does not emit it — so today a theme would have to restate every value by hand, which is exactly the drift the token pipeline exists to prevent. The pipeline comes first; the theme follows it.

0 open questions

Cornerstone in a Rails application, which is two problems rather than one. The asset pipeline has to serve the stylesheets and the element definitions the way it serves the rest of an app’s assets, fingerprinted and cached alongside them. And the cs-* elements and the native element styles have to arrive on a page with no JavaScript bundler in front of them, because a Rails app is entitled not to have one and a library that assumes otherwise is not usable there.

0 open questions

Making a brand’s look something you configure rather than something you fork. One generator takes a brand’s knobs — its palette, its type scale, its shape — and emits the tokens that the components, the CSS utilities and the published token package all read, so retuning a colour or adding a third brand reaches every consumer from one place. The same work settles what the published token package guarantees, which is what tells you whether a token name is safe to build on.

7 open questions