RE: [css4-color] Grayscale shorthand (with alpha)

That's another good question.

Would love to hear more from the design perspective before going far down the "let's build something we think they want (but isn't really what they would want)".

-Brian

From: Rik Cabanier [mailto:cabanier@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:27 PM
To: Brian Manthos
Cc: Tab Atkins Jr.; Rudolph Gottesheim; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css4-color] Grayscale shorthand (with alpha)

Brian,

are you trying to achieve a colorimetrically correct gray?
I think people just want to go from gray(22) to rgb(22, 22, 22)...

Rik
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com<mailto:brianman@microsoft.com>> wrote:
My curiosity is more about...

Why is "perfect gray" special vs. the near-grays?

For example, are designers only interested in rgb(22, 22, 22, <somealpha>) or also rgb(22, 27, 32, <somealpha>)?

-----Original Message-----
From: Tab Atkins Jr. [mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com<mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com>]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 12:58 PM
To: Brian Manthos
Cc: Rudolph Gottesheim; www-style@w3.org<mailto:www-style@w3.org>
Subject: Re: [css4-color] Grayscale shorthand (with alpha)

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com<mailto:brianman@microsoft.com>> wrote:
> I'm curious to hear more about why gray is so popular from an artistic / designer perspective.
>
> Is it the "black and white" muted photo affect (in which case a filter might be better)?   I have a few other guesses as well.

"gray" is a wide term here.  Anything between white and black is covered there, and those two colors are definitely quite common.  I gave a use-case where near-white and near-black are often used for background and text to reduce the harshness of pure black-on-white contrast.  Writing that out requires, currently, repeating yourself.
There's a potential readability win for this case.

~TJ