Re: [css-color] wider/deeper colors

On Tuesday 2016-02-16 03:20 -0500, Lea Verou wrote:
> 
> > On 16Feb, 2016, at 03:07, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> > […]
> > 
> > This seems rather different from fonts, in that specifying a fixed
> > set of alternatives (i.e., a list of color spaces known to CSS), if
> > done right, doesn't limit what developers can do, only how they can
> > do it (which is something language designers limit all the time).
> > If the color spaces specified in CSS can represent the range of
> > colors that developers want to specify, there isn't (I don't think)
> > a loss of capability in forbidding other options.  And there is a
> > gain, in terms of simplicity of the platform and avoiding dealing
> > with the bandwidth and complexity of loading external resources.
> > 
> > -David
> 
> How exactly do you imagine this working? How many ICC profiles will we alias? Do you have a set in mind that “developers want to specify”? If I want to specify colors with the color profile of my specific monitor, how I will do so? If I want to specify colors that match a specific printer's output, how will I do that?

I'm saying that any single particular color, even if it's outside
sRGB, should be specifiable without browser support for downloading
and processing ICC color profiles.  If you have a particular need to
convert a set of numerical descriptions of colors (described
according to a particular ICC profile) on the client into a form
accepted by the browser, it seems like you could do it with a
javascript library -- and, further, if there were substantial demand
for such a feature, examples of such javascript libraries and how
they behave should be being raised in this discussion.

The issue that seems important to solve in this thread is to make
sure we agree on how we want colors outside of the sRGB gamut to be
specified in CSS.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
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               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)