Re: [css-color] Preemptive rebuttal to requests to merge the JS color classes

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Naming Collisions
> ================
>
> Currently, the members of each class are named by a single letter,
> just like the function: RGBColor has r, g, b, and a members, etc.  If
> we merged color classes together, then the "b" member of rgb() and the
> "b" member of hwb() would clash, as they mean different things.  (The
> "h" from hsl() and hwb() also clash, as do the "a" members of all of
> the classes, but they're interpreted identically, so that doesn't
> matter.)
>
> The obvious fix for this is to expand the names from single-letter
> (from the function names) to words.  That doesn't actually work,
> though: "black" is shared, with different meaning, by both CMYK and
> HWB.  Those two live in different color spaces, but if we ever add
> HSV, which I think is reasonable, both it and HSL share "saturation"
> with different meaning.

In IRC, Lea inadvertently made some arguments for keeping the
attributes single-letter, rather than words.  The "k" in "cmyk"
technically stands for "key" (as in key plate; I don't know what that
is), rather than "blacK", so using words means we have a choice of
being accurate-but-confusing or intuitive-but-inaccurate.

Further, it's unclear whether the "canonical" words for the W and B
channels of HWB are white/black or whiteness/blackness.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 8 August 2014 20:27:16 UTC