Re: X11 Colors (was Last call comments on CSS3 module: color)

I've been trying to stay out of the Color module debate, since we're
simply rehashing last years threads (or 1996's depending on who you ask)
but I can't quite resist...

I find myself very conflicted on this one... re-reading it again, what
do you see:

The system colors are still there and they're still useless - infact
they're more useless than ever because they can't express the look and
feel of *any* current operating system, since Windows XP shipped. But at
least the set of system colors didn't get significantly larger!

We did get rgb(r,g,b,a) to cover the need for fine control over
background, foreground and border transparency, which on the whole I
like because it addresses a real need.

As just disussed again, the X11 colors are still there, though now
aparently this is a last call... which is a shame because they were a
bad idea when I (and others)
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2001Mar/0085.html>
complained about them in the previous draft last year.
To my mind the most sensible solution might be to leave things at the 16
HTML 4.0 colors. One suspects that will cover 90% of what web designers
actually use (though there are obvious problems like the lack of common
colors eg, "orange" and "pink" - sigh, I have such deja vu). 

> Chris Liley wrote:
> No, not really. Anyone can make up their own names and declare them as
> entities (in any XML document) and use them. For browsers that use a
> real XML parser, of course. For external CSS files, people need to use
> a preprocessor I guess.
> 

Well, that's something I've raised in the past too: 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2001Sep/0035.html>

or for the whole thread, so Bert gets to have his say too:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2001Sep/thread.html#72>

As the link above also demonstrates, its come up over and over again
that people want user defined colors and relative color keywords 

(ie, naively, something like @color XYZCorpBackground #666666)

and relative colours

.foo { border: XYZCorpBackground darker; }

but no mechanism exists to address this is in the spec. A couple of
proposals have bounced around this list in the last couple of days -
maybe wonderful, maybe fatally flawed. Its just a shame there wasn't
this much material when the module was initially drafted, otherwise we
could have spent some time discussing these ideas and maybe coming up
with something great. Now it seems the WG is left with the choice of
CR-ing something a lot of us don't like because it doesn't meet our
needs and some even feel it takes a step backwards by standardizing a
set of bad ideas.

I can't help but say that for me: despite the solid improvements it does
make, Color is not ready for CR in its current form, because it
standardizes things that many feel ought not to be, and fails to address
what people regularly ask for. 

-- 
AndyT (lordpixel - the cat who walks through walls)
A little bigger on the inside

I think we finally found the killer app for Flash: animated stick men

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2002 01:24:42 UTC