Re: [css-color-4] Renaming gray()

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Jan Tosovsky <j.tosovsky@email.cz> wrote:
> On 2014-07-23 Lea Verou wrote:
>> The gray() functional notation [1] is a great idea for specifying
>> desaturated colors with varying degrees of transparency in a concise
>> and
>> readable way. However, I’m not sure about the naming. Right now, the
>> named color `gray` corresponds to gray(50%). gray(0%) is black and
>> gray(100%) is white.
>
> Some XSL-FO formatters use 'grayscale' psedo profile for this:
> http://mediawiki.renderx.com/index.php/XEP_User_Guide/Appendix_A_XSL-FO_Conformance#Color_Specifiers
>
> But I take it rather as a syntactic sugar for CMYK: 0,0,0,blac(K).
>
> However, if I understand correctly, CSS gray is sRGB based and hence potentially problematic for printing when transformed to device profiles.
>
> I like the approach of pseudo Gray/CMYK profiles as they allow me defining exact values which are preserved (in the PDF output) without profile conversions. So when I define gray, it is printed as shade of black instead of RGB composition.

Some day we'll have the ability to define/reference color profiles,
and you'll be able to use a cmyk() function properly.  Until then,
device-cmyk() exists, which automatically uses the output device's
color profile (if the UA knows it), and otherwise uses the ugly naive
conversion to RGB.

> Btw, as non native speaker I am very often confused by grey/gray mess and it is unclear which one to use ;-)

American English uses "gray", British English uses "grey".  CSS
generally uses American English to define its names.

> Would 'lightness' be misleading here?

That seems to indicate a quality of some color, rather than a color by itself.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2014 23:59:25 UTC