Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-color-4] Better name for gray()? (#4621)

I dislike most of these names, as they're misleading/weird: 

* `white()`/`black()` are odd, as only color geeks consider white/black to be variations of each other. (and `black(100%)` being white is right out)
* `shade()`/`tint()` have specific meanings and we should reserve them for actually shading/tinting colors as color-manipulation functions
* `lightness()` is a maybe, but it's long. Not a killer objection, but still.

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I'm not sure what you mean by:

> Apart from that, there doesn't seem to be any clear consensus on the name, besides that `gray()` is not the best option.

since the data shows `gray()` as having the second highest individual % among all the options (only behind 1-arg `rgb()`).

If we did change the name, I'm okay with a 1-arg variant of an existing colorspace function, but not `rgb()` specifically, since `gray()` is *not* defined in terms of `rgb()`; it would be confusing and bad if `rgb(50%)` was not equal to `rgb(50% 50% 50%)`. 1-arg `lab()` and/or `lch()` might work tho.

Another possibility, inspired by the existing (oddly named, but we're stuck with them) colorspace functions, is just `l()`.

A final possibility is we just drop `gray()` entirely, since `gray(X)` is exactly equal to `lab(X 0 0)`, which is an insignificant difference in typing. Downside of this is that you lose the potentially-useful immediately-obvious semantics of "this is a gray color". But we've lived without that for 20+ years, so we can probably continue to. ^_^

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Received on Tuesday, 24 December 2019 21:39:55 UTC