Re: Provenance of "sRGB for ICC profiles" on w3.org

On 02-Sep-17 22:28, Peter Occil wrote:

> I'm aware of the following document posted on the W3C Web site:
>
> https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/srgb
>
> I find it very useful as a reference, but: Where did this document 
> come from? 

Hi Peter,

I see that my colleague Liam Quin provided some answers whilst I was 
away on vacation. Allow me to provide a little more context.

On 26 April 1996, together with Håkon Lie, I organized a W3C Workshop on 
Printing and the Web. We called for position papers. The notes from that 
meeting are at

https://www.w3.org/Printing/minutes960425.html

In addition to identifying a need for Web Fonts, a packaging mechanism, 
and page-related styling, there was a proposal from Microsoft and HP on 
a standard RGB space for the Web. That document was posted on our site 
and over time became a widely-linked reference on sRGB.

https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html

In the course of later standardization of sRGB at the IEC, it was 
noticed that the rounded-off coefficients in that paper resulted in a 
discontinuity in the transfer curve. (Not of practical significance, at 
least at 8 or 10 bits, but worth correcting in a standard). Thus, the 
final standard had different coefficients to eliminate the issue (and 
also clarified the viewing conditions).

However, search engines love long-lived links so we added a disclaimer 
to the top of our document, pointing to more recent work (we don't want 
to take it down because of the historical value).

Later, we noticed that a PDF version was still there (and still being 
linked to) and PDF is harder to add an obsoletion notice than HTML. So 
we replaced it with a copy of the color.org PDF.

> Who were its authors?  When was it posted?

For the original document:

Michael Stokes (Hewlett-Packard), Matthew Anderson (Microsoft),
Srinivasan Chandrasekar (Microsoft), Ricardo Motta (Hewlett-Packard)
Version 1.10, November 5, 1996

>   I couldn't find it linked anywhere on the W3C site except on a 
> mailing list message (ref. 1).
It used to be widely linked from our own specifications (CSS 1 for 
example was defined to use sRGB as the default, at my insistence) but 
over time as our standards have matured we have cited the finished sRGB 
standard from the IEC rather than a historical position paper. None of 
our current specification link to the position paper, to my knowledge.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media

Received on Monday, 4 September 2017 11:10:13 UTC