Re: Cascading Style Sheets

On Dec 1,  3:01pm, Space Cowboy wrote:

> L*A*B color is supposed to show every shade of color you can think of, but
> does it really do any good? RGB can show more colors than CMYK can, but
> there shades that CMYK is capable of but not RGB.

LAB can show all colors that any RGB or CMYK or hexachrome can.

> Even though L*A*B can show most visible colors

all visible colors, by definition

> , you can't produce anything
> but the colors in RGB on screen

whose screen? Do you have the same make of monitor I do?

> and CMYK in print. CSS basically a screen
> standard. I know it's being extended, but it's not an all-purpose
> standard, and shouldn't be.

Certainly CSS is good for screen layout, and certainly CSS2 adds some
features that are needed for printing. Go look at the CSS2 spec, the ack
section, check out which companies are members of the working group and
also make color inkjets ;-) and would love home users to be printing lots of
color web pages.

> Since it is basically a screen standard,
> adding colors that can't be seen on a screen is pretty silly.

Not at all. Adding colors that some screens can display while others
can't is fine, particularly if your monitor has a wider gamut than the
next guys. And, it isn't a screen standard. If a company logo happens
to contain colors that can't be represented on a particular screen, it
still makes sense to be able to say what the color should be - and you
may get a closer match when you print.

> HLS is a good idea, but it all will come out the same, and I really don't
> see a need to have conversions when the result is the same (and RGB is
> machine-readable, too).

Both are machine readable. Yes, lots of conversions would be bad. Yes,
HLS does not represent any colors RGB cannot. And yes, the conversion
from HLS to RGB is like 10 lines of code.

> I would think that /at most/ you could have CMYK for "paged media," RGB
> for screen.

You do *not* want to have CMYK specifications in stylesheets, unless your
stylesheet is targetted at a particular make and model of printer with a
particular ink set printing on a particular weight and finish of paper.



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 1 December 1997 15:38:37 UTC