Variant

A genuine fork in a component's content model, props, states or behavior that still satisfies the same accessibility pattern — a different supported content shape may be a variant; populating an existing optional preview field is not; one that only looks different is a treatment

The design-system sense (the Agentic DS direction: the Component Schemas deep dive and September 23 discussion), and stricter than the word's everyday use: the accessibility pattern is the test, and a purely visual difference fails it in the other direction. Real variants are rare, are governance-reviewed when they occur, and are promoted into the shared Core when they turn out to be broadly useful. The accordion's variants: [] is the worked example — nothing has yet forced a structural fork, because treatment now carries what used to be listed here.

In cwds, one value of one axis a component offers — { axis, value, kind, authored, implemented, occurring, corpus } — with kind recording whether the axis changes behavior or only appearance

An observation, not a decision: the record says what the authoring surface offers, what the code reads, and how often the estate uses each. It is evidence of the options the estate offers, not the Component Schema's variants. Measured 2026-09-25, most of its values are props in the design-system sense (flexbox direction, hero position, the accordion's single or multi), some are treatment values (the accordion's icon position), and none so far is a variant. So kind: presentational does not mean treatment. Ruled on cwds #59 (2026-09-25): the list stays, each value gains an optional mapsTo: prop | treatment | variant saying what it becomes in the schema, and declared treatments live in the schema's token contract, never in a cwds treatments[].

In Nuxt UI, and most component libraries, the prop that picks a visual style — variant="ghost", variant="outline"

A treatment, in the design-system vocabulary. The library word is not going to change; read variant in a component API as treatment and reserve variant in the design-system sense for a fork.