HSL vrs RGB

Dear CSS Committee

I would encourage you to include the Hue, Saturation, Lightness (HSL) notation 
for color in Level 2 of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

The RGB notation is fine if you are a color terminal, or a techono-weenie, or a 
computer nerd (which I am), but if you are a "normal" human the HSL is easier 
to understand on a cognitive level. As Laura Lemay states on p. 209 of her book 
"Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in 14 days" (SamsNet, 1996):

"The Hue, Saturation, and Brightness model is sometimes called the subjective 
or perceptive color, because this model intuitively describes how we preceive 
color and changes from one color to another."

I just spent 15 months at Carnegie Mellon University getting my Masters in 
Human-Computer Interaction and color models were discussed in several classes. 
The Hex numbers required by RGB were never intuitive and the only way to adjust 
them was by random trial and error unless you had a color picker tool. On the 
other hand you could make changes to an HSL value and see the color change in 
the direction desired.

As Henry David Thoreau said: "Out life is frittered away by detail...simplify, 
simplify." One way to do this is to include the Hue, Saturation, Lightness 
(HSL) notation for color in Level 2 of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Thanks

Rich Kaylor

These are my personal opinions.

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 1997 11:40:07 UTC