- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 19:59:27 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org, "Robert Hess" <roberth@microsoft.com>
On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, 4:43:37 PM, Robert wrote: RH> I've written a number of articles about colors, including the web RH> colors, as well as touching upon the X11 named colors. I one time built RH> up some calculation tables to rank/sort the various colors of the 216 RH> web colors, and from that created a chart that illustrated the fairly RH> even distribution that these colors provide across the HSL space (see RH> the second chart in: RH> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwebge RH> n/html/colorpick.asp), Which proves exactly nothing. Since HSL space is perceptually highly non-uniform, even distribution in HSL tells you nothing about the distribution of the actual colors. Since HSL is merely a polar form of RGB and since the allegedly 'Web safe' colors are merely a 6x6x6 grid on the RGB cube, naturally the web-safe colors are evenly distributed in HSL. To see whether the colors are in fact evenly distributed, the easiest approach would be to plot them in Lab. Many better, but more complicated, approaches are also possible using more advanced color appearance models and color difference metrics. An example, which I presented in 1994 at the fourth WWW conference in Boston, would be figure seven in http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/53/gq-alloc.html linked from http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/53/gq-boston.html. Note the enormous spacing of dark greens in the 6x6x6 cube, for example. Woohoo, 1996 now 1994. At this rate, we will hit 1931 - where it all started - fairly soon. RH> I then thought it might be interesting to perform RH> the same calculations on the X11 colors and see if I could build up a RH> similar chart to help show the distribution pattern. RH> It was -hideous-. Which again, tells you nothing. -- Chris mailto:chris@w3.org
Received on Thursday, 6 June 2002 14:00:17 UTC