Re: [css-color] vendor named color enhancement

It’s great to see so much interest. We love where the color module level 4 is going and think it will bring color to a whole new level on the web.

As a quick note, what I’m about to say is not a promise in any way, shape or form that Pantone will change it’s ways or that it will change it’s product structure, this is just a discussion, for now.

I’d like to address Pantone IP. Pantone has been, to say it lightly, a bully regarding it’s IP. Some consider it non-sensical, other consider it to be the basis of their business model. I consider it to be a bit of both. There is a growing feeling that Pantone needs to loosen their grip.

To me, Pantone is a nomenclature for color ( just like everyone knows what green looks like, a lot of people know what PANTONE 101 C looks like - it’s a yellow ). It is also a business that sells the information on how to reproduce that color. The separation of the two is very important.

We need more than nomenclature to render a color on the web, which is why Pantone might be willing to loosen it’s Terms of use regarding the sRGB data for it’s colors. This is a discussion that we would need to have, but it’s looking good. I think sRGB will do the trick as a first step. We don’t want or expect perfect reproduction on the web, we just want a good approximation.

The real goal is to specify the color using the names, which in a sense, means so much more than the data.

Tab, If Pantone is something the W3C is interested in, I can definitely help out, I want to help out. Anything I can do, I will do.

AC


On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 7:33 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 2:30 PM, Amelia Bellamy-Royds
<amelia.bellamy.royds@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 July 2016 at 14:16, Alex Cohen <AlexCohen@xrite.com> wrote:
>> For a while now I’ve been contemplating the idea of extending css named
>> colors to include vendor specific colors that are used across other
>> industries such as print. Before going ahead and writing up a full proposal,
>> I want to get the opinion of the people on this list to see if it is
>> something you might be interested in.
>>
>> The idea is pretty simple. As you probably already know, Pantone is pretty
>> well known across the printing industry for it’s color standards. Designers
>> can specify Pantone color in a simple and efficient manner and rest assured
>> that the final output product will reflect what they imagined. We want to
>> apply that same concept to the web.
>>
>> A good example I like to use is a can of Coke. Wherever you are, anywhere
>> you go, you will recognize the red they use, it’s their “brand” color. It’s
>> important that this color be reproduced correctly across all their
>> manufacturing plants so that you can compare two cans printed in totally
>> different locations and not see a difference in color.
>>
>> The same could be applied to the web through a new set of vendor specific
>> css color names.
>>
>> We’ve done a couple of trials here at Pantone and have gotten some
>> exciting results. We have a patch submitted to WebKit which shows the idea
>> in a working state.
>>
>> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159963

>>
>> A quick idea of how the vendor specific naming could work:
>>
>> * start with a vendor specific prefix.
>> * continue with a color specific indicator.
>> * finish with a book marker.
>>
>>
>> Example:
>>
>> Actual PANTONE Color Name: PANTONE 101 C
>>
>> Web PANTONE Color Name: p101c
>
> You'll want to look at the draft CSS Color Level 4 specification section on
> defining colors relative to device-calibrated color profiles:
>
> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/Overview.html#icc-colors

>
> This syntax is designed to be extensible to any new color-definition system
> against which printers and digital displays could be calibrated. Although
> the pre-defined profiles currently in the spec use numeric values, keyword
> values are also possible.
>
> Given the wide use of Pantone colours in printing and industrial design, I'm
> suspect CSS WG members would be open to integrating it in the spec as a
> pre-defined color profile, if all IP issues could be resolved with Pantone
> in a manner that met W3C's patent requirements.
>
> Otherwise, the syntax is designed to allow authors & printers/display
> manufacturers to specify custom color systems without them having to be
> added to the spec.
>
> All of this is still a separate issue from calibrating printers / and
> digital displays against Pantone standards, so that they correctly display
> the named color. As others have mentioned, that's a tricky question when
> dealing with web content. However, the new syntax would ensure that if the
> display or printer is calibrated, authors would have a standard way of
> communicating the desired color.
>
> (PS, I'm not a member of this working group, just someone who's been
> following the discussion. Chris Lilley & Tab Atkins, the editors of CSS
> Color Level 4, would be your best contacts for deciding on next steps.)

Haha, Amelia, you beat me to it!

Yes, what Amelia said exactly. We *just* added a syntax for
specifying colors in arbitrary color profiles. For example, to
specify a color in the Rec.2020 colorspace, you can write something
like `color(rec2020 .1 .2 .3)` (I'm not sure what all arguments the
Rec.2020 colorspace takes, but assuming it's a red, green, and blue
value, that exactly is correct).

We also have a syntax for colorspaces that define named colors instead
of exposing numeric channels: `color(pantone "101 C")` is how we would
write your example color, assuming we had a Pantone colorspace
builtin.

We'd love to work with you to get a royalty-free reference for the
Pantone color system, suitable for wide implementation in browsers, to
aid in printing and color management for companies using the Pantone
standards. If you can help with that, great! The "royalty-free" part
has been what's blocked us in the past, or else we would have already
added it, given the evident demand. The W3C has strict requirements
on what kinds of things it allows to be standardized.

~TJ

Received on Saturday, 23 July 2016 16:32:11 UTC