Re: HSL (fwd)

MegaZone wrote: 
> Ok - what is HSL?  In all my years of networking, coding, UI work, web work,
> etc, I haven't encountered this one.  :-)

I believe it stands for Hue, Saturation, Luminance.  There's some sort
of mathematical transform to go from HSL to RGB.  I really don't see
why we shouldn't support a number of reasonable color spaces, HSL, RGB,
and CIE are all reasonable from my point of view.  It isn't alot
of code.

> All standard color packages easily output RGB - even XV on UNIX will tell
> you the values.  Let alone all of the paint and draw packages for the
> various platforms.

Umm,  I guarantee that people will need to edit it as well,  and
HSL has advantages (according to the commentors) at that level. 

> And the browsers already understand RGB at a basic level.

And it would be fairly simple to make them understand HSL.  I'm
guessing a few hours of work is the most that's involved.  It's an
input format,  you can still use RGB internally.

> I disagree.  I think RGB is very easy to learn.  It isn't the easier to
> use, but it comes with practice.

Why make people practice?  That isn't the point of the exercise.  The
point is to make it easy for somebody to create a styled web page with
either WYSIWYG tools (where the color model doesn't matter since the
tool can deal with human factors) or a text editor (where it does).

> Just looking at a color how would I determine the 'HSL' code/value/whatever
> without a tool?

OK,  just looking at a color, how would I determine the 'RGB' value?
Remember that I'm not a color spectrometer.  You'd make an estimate at
the hue, the saturation and the brightness,  just as for RGB you'd guess
at the red, green and blue contribution.

> I'd rather not add yet another variable to the color mix.

I don't see why not.  Is the objection to complexity, effort of
documentation, standardization issues, or compatibility?  I see 
alot of objections to something which really looks kind of trivial,
and none on things which look substantive.

Doug
-- 
Doug Rand				drand@sgi.com
Silicon Graphics/SSO			http://reality.sgi.com/drand
Disclaimer: These are my views,  SGI's views are in 3D

Received on Tuesday, 9 December 1997 10:42:43 UTC