Color specification in style sheets

I just recently learned that the CSS group of W3C is planning to use RGB 
specifications as a human interface for color specification.  I would like 
to strongly suggest that RGB (which is nearly unintelligible to any human) not
be the primary (and certainly not the only) mechanism for these specifications.

While the limited set of names will be a help, having a human-friendly notation
based on color perception rather than light-value decomposition would be an
improvement.  The HSL system, which represents a more geometrically sensible 
color space than the cube, is certainly one reasonable approach (though it
would be nice to leave the specification open to the definition of new 
color spaces given a format and mapping).  I encourage you to include it in 
the standard.

Joseph A. Konstan
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Minnesota
konstan@cs.umn.edu

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 1997 10:44:06 UTC