- From: Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:25:35 -0700
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, Dean Jackson <dino@apple.com>, public-fx@w3.org, www-svg <www-svg@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CAGN7qDAqU71-tN0KwXAUmewDihi2+1OYGLJG8boqH3HGWLwsEQ@mail.gmail.com>
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote: > On Sunday, September 4, 2011, 6:06:01 AM, Rik wrote: > > RC> I agree.I don't know what makes sRGB so special that it is the > RC> default colorspace in SVG and used all over the spec. > > Because it was proposed (and accepted) as a standard default space, in the > days when colour management was something that applied solely to high-end > printing and Apple was trying to bring it to the desktop while other > platforms were silent on the subject or in ostrich mode. > > So HTML 3.2 and 4 use it, and CSS 1 and 2. Thus, SVG did also. > > RC> Shouldn't SVG be color space agnostic (like PDF and Postscript)? > > Agnostic can easily translate to 'throw any value as at the screen and hope > for the best'. That wasn't really good enough in 1980 and is certainly not > good enough, even as a lowest common denominator, now. Consumer electronics > has settled on sRGB while desktops and laptops (but not mobile, yet) has > settled on ICC v.4 as a base capability. > Well, by defining it as the standard, you are limiting colors on devices that have a wider gamut than sRGB. Acrobat lets the user choose what his default space is. Why not let a SVG renderer do the same? You could say in the spec that sRGB is a reasonable default. Maybe my disconnect comes from thinking about the destination/document profile. Looking through the SVG spec, I can't find what colorspace the colors are mapped to. Is it the device profile or sRGB? > > So sRGB as a default was a reasonable choice in 1996 and remains (arguably, > has wider industry support) as a fallback for less capable devices in 2011. > > So I would disagree on 'agnostic'[1] as a goal, but if you rephrase to > "shouldn't SVG allow other colour spaces as well" then I would be in full > agreement. As long as there is a clear fallback. > Yes, SVG should support other color spaces natively. There's been some discussion on spot and cmyk colors but I'm not sure if there is a enough momentum to define it. Especially browser vendors might be hesitant to implement this. > > RC> There are several parts in the spec that talk about 'linear RGB' vs > sRGB that are very confusing. > > Could you explain why it is confusing. The equations (in both directions) > are given, and are fairly simple. > It's not so much about the equations. Why is it needed? I don't believe that Adobe does this if you're just drawing in RGB or CMYK. (We do play some tricks if you convert to a different colorspace but I don't think that's relevant.) > > RC> Maybe there is some history here that I'm not aware of... > > Quite a bit, yes. > > > [1] Either from Ancient Greek ???????? (agn?stos, ?ignorant, not knowing?) > or from a- + Gnostic. Deriving (either way) from Ancient Greek ?- (a-, > ?not?) + ???????? (gign?sk?, ?I know?). > > -- > Chris Lilley Technical Director, Interaction Domain > W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead > Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG > Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups > >
Received on Monday, 12 September 2011 04:26:04 UTC