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

(I meant to post to to the mailing list, and not just to Lilley.)

Thank you for the response.  To be clear, though, all three of my 
questions referred to what is now the "How to interpret sRGB for ICC 
profiles" document (in PDF format), rather than the sRGB background 
document or any other document.  Now that I know that that particular 
document came from the ICC, rather than the W3C, why was that particular 
document chosen to replace any other document on the W3C site?


On 09/04/2017 07:10 AM, Chris Lilley wrote:
> 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.
>

Received on Monday, 4 September 2017 22:23:56 UTC