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

> On 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).

I prefer black() to gray(), so it is a percentage of how black it is. This jives with my experience in the print industry, where, while working with one-color spot printing, specifying a shade of the color (most often of black), we did not gave under color removal or grayscale replacement to deal with. It was just a line screen representing a percentage of how dark (how solid, really, since you could print in some other spot color like yellow once you put it on the press) it should be. You had to deal with dot gain that depended on what kind of paper you printed on, but I don't think that's relevant here.  

My point is that black() should not be treated the same as the K in CMYK after a non-naive conversion from RGB. Black(100%) should be treated the same as rgb(0,0,0). 

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

We use American English. That's why we have 'color' instead of 'colour'. 'Grey' is the British version of American's 'gray' (and vice versa). I kind of like the British spelling of 'grey', but we should be consistent.

Received on Sunday, 27 July 2014 15:28:15 UTC