Color Keywords (was RE: Cascading Style Sheets)

Chris Wilson wrote:

> Hmm, yes - well, I also argued that the difference between
> support for the 16 named colors in the CSS specification and
> the 139 colors that are "current practice" (as supported by
> Netscape and Microsoft for a couple of years now)

Does anyone happen to know if these [1] are those 139 colors?
From Mac OS 8, 8-bit, four of the first eight colors are
identical.

> was under 1k of bits (123 additional colors * (4bytes hash of
> name + 3 bytes RGB value + 1 byte because most systems align on
> word boundaries) = 984 bytes), and lost as well.

Why do CSS1 and CSS2 spell out names, and then not define RGB
values [2] for the 16 color keywords? Sorry to repeat anything.

Guesses. (1) To give implementors a chance to render those colors
in something other than their Windows VGA and HTML 3.2 values?
(2) Do the RGB values, deprecated and enumerated in the HTML 4.0
PR, give people the idea that if the CSS keywords do have
values, then they are: 000, fff, f00, f0f, 0f0, ff0, 00f, 0ff, and
C0C0C0, 808080, 800000, 800080, 008000, 808000, 000080, 008080?

A style author might intend, "Any 'red' is fine, thank you!" and
be grateful for a window of opportunity through which his or her
readers might see red. The Half-ripe Tomato red that author sees
could be mistaken for Late Cherry on a receiving setup, influencing
that user's color choice in a different direction, I'd think.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/msg06510.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2/syndata.html#h-4.2.5

--
Susan Lesch
Mac Virus
http://www.macvirus.com/

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 1997 23:22:39 UTC