Challenge 3: Why Figma's Model Is a Genuinely Different Architecture — Solution Walkthrough

The answer:

Per this chapter's own material, Illustrator and Inkscape both work
with a local file — opened, edited, and explicitly saved back to disk,
one person's own copy at a time even after sharing. Figma has no
equivalent "the file" in that sense at all; the design exists directly
in Figma's own cloud workspace, with everyone looking at the same live
canvas rather than their own separate copy.

Why this is architecture, not just interface:

The difference isn't merely that Figma looks different or runs in a
browser — it's that the fundamental unit of "where the design lives"
is different. A file-based tool's whole editing model assumes one
local copy that gets saved and shared; Figma's whole editing model
assumes one shared cloud copy that multiple people access
simultaneously. These are two different foundations the rest of each
tool's own behavior is built on top of, not two different skins over
the same underlying idea.

Why this distinction matters practically:

Every other genuine difference this chapter describes — no Save
command, real-time multiplayer editing, automatic version history —
follows directly from this one architectural choice, rather than being
a separate, unrelated feature.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This exercise checks that Figma's cloud-native model is correctly
understood as a foundational architectural difference from
Illustrator/Inkscape's file-based model, not merely a different user
interface layered over the same underlying approach.