Re: [css-color] wider/deeper colors

> On Feb 19, 2016, at 14:02, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't see that as hardcoding, rather the opposite. Unlike the device-cmyk() approach where you don't specify what the color space is and therefore depend on the output device being what you hope it will be to get your colors right, when you actually specify color spaces, you can optimize your assets (both images and explicit colors) to be the best match for what you think is the most likely output medium, while still having them work when rendering to something else.
> 
> We could just drop all color spaces other than CIELab, but that'd be hugely impractical. When you know something is most likely to come out into an sRGB environment, specifying things in sRGB makes sense, and color management deals with other environments. Just the same, if something is  likely to or meant for being printed on US Web Coated SWOP, working in that space makes sense, and doing so explicitly lets UAs deal with different situations.
> 
> This is a very weird way of thinking about color management.

Why is that weird? Of course the fact that we've been rendering things almost exclusively into an sRGB space is the reason why images and manually specified colors have been sRGB. Doing otherwise would have been impractica, even if we had color management.

Just the same, if you anticipate the main use of your content being in some other color space, it make sense to provide assets (and manually specified colors) that match that color space, be it fooRGB or barCMYK.

I'm not saying this is the only reason to use color management, you may very well want it because you have existing assets in various color spaces and you just want them to play nicely with each other.

> Can you point to a spec that say where the output profile come from?

I don't think we have that. To me it makes sense to leave this entirely up to the UAs, with the understanding that taking advantage of the gamut of the medium you're rendering into will lead a better experience.

I think we probably have a SHOULD somewhere advising UAs to use the underlying OS's facilities to avoid treating all screens as if they were sRGB, as doing so would lead to terrible results on wide gamut displays, but that's about it.

> Is there such a thing as a document profile?

Except in emails sent to a printer along with a PDF containing untagged CMYK, which say "in this document, CMYK means SWOP", no I don't think there is. But I'm not sure where you're going with that question.

 - Florian