Introduction and conformance
1.0.0, frozen 2026-10). Backward compatible within 1.x (§16.4). Supersedes the draft v0.1, kept as a historical record; 0.1 files open through the 0.1 → 1.0 migration (§16.2).https://getkimo.design/schema/kimo-1.0.json (JSON Schema draft 2020-12), generated into packages/core-schema/schema/kimo-1.0.schema.json . The 0.1 schema stays published at …/kimo-0.1.json (schema/kimo-0.1.schema.json, frozen).@kimo/core-schema (packages/core-schema). Where this document and the implementation disagree, that is a bug in one of them; file an issue.docs/teardown.md §10. Every place where this spec resolves an ambiguity in, or deviates from, that section is listed in §20.A .kimo file is a plain UTF-8 JSON document describing a design: a flat table of nodes (frames, shapes, text, component instances, …), design variables with multi-axis themes, imported libraries and content-addressed assets. It is designed to be diffable and mergeable with plain git, editable by agents through tools, and convertible to code deterministically.
The key words MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY and OPTIONAL are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals.
Conformance classes:
- A writer produces
.kimofiles. A conforming writer MUST produce the canonical serialization (§15) of a document that is valid (§17). - A reader consumes
.kimofiles. A conforming reader MUST accept every valid document of a format version it supports, MUST apply the defaults (§14) and resolution rules (§9, §10), and MUST follow the forward-compatibility rules (§16.3). - A validator reports the issues of §17.
Terms: node — an entry of the nodes table; component — a node whose component is truthy; instance — a node of type instance; binding — a { "$ref": … } object standing for a variable's value; record — a JSON object whose keys are data (ids, names, axis names) rather than property names; struct — a JSON object whose keys are property names defined by this spec.