Color specification - RGB, NO!

• From: Matt Conway <mconway@microsoft.com>
• Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 17:20:55 -0800
• To: "'www-style@w3.org'" <www-style@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF0180766C@red-msg-52.dns.microsoft.com>

It is my understanding that the Cascading Style Sheets Group (CSS) is going
to offer RGB notation for color, which is seen as an improvement over
strings of hex digits for color specification.

As a user interface researcher, I implore you to allow at least HSL (hue,
saturation, lightness) as an alternative notation for color. 

The user interface literature is stuffed with data that shows that RGB is a
very hard color space for specifying colors even with tools, at least
compared to HSL. There are in fact, even better color models, but HSL has
the virtue of being uncontroversial and trivial to convert to and from RGB. 

Please allow an HSL notation in CSS. 

Thank you
Matt Conway 
User Interface Group, Microsoft Research
(425) 936-1991

Received on Monday, 1 December 1997 20:21:16 UTC