Re: Color Management in HTML5?

On Mar 4, 2010, at 10:24 PM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:

> I am sitting in a meeting of the ICC (International Colour  
> Consortium) and the question about whether (or how) HTML5 address  
> colour management issues came up. So I did a quick search of the  
> current draft of the document and the ONLY reference I could find  
> was that color specifications are in sRGB.  No mention about  
> profiles in images, etc.
>
> Is this indeed the case?  Has any consideration been given to richer  
> color management of data (esp. images) present in HTML5 documents?
>
> If not, is there any reason that the ICC could not present a Change  
> Proposal to introduce requirements for UAs in this manner?

Most color management issues on the Web are not in the domain of  
HTML5. Color management of CSS colors (e.g. colors use for text,  
background colors, border colors, etc) is an issue for CSS. I believe  
there is a proposal to allow CSS colors from an arbitrary colorspace  
to be used. Nominally, CSS colors are in the sRGB colorspace by default.

Color management of images is an issue for the image format specs and/ 
or a quality-of-implementation issue.

Color management of video is up to the video format specs and/or a  
quality-of-implementation issue.


Just to report on what Safari does: we colormatch images that are  
tagged with an explicit colorspace, but we treat CSS colors and colors  
in untagged images as being in the device color space (instead of  
treating as sRGB). This seems to give a good balance between  
performance for the common case and color-correctness for cases where  
precise color is desired.

Regards,
Maciej