Re: Color Management in HTML5?

On Mar 5, 2010, at 2:04 PM, L. David Baron wrote:

> On Friday 2010-03-05 00:08 -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> Just to report on what Safari does: we colormatch images that are
>> tagged with an explicit colorspace, but we treat CSS colors and
>> colors in untagged images as being in the device color space
>> (instead of treating as sRGB). This seems to give a good balance
>> between performance for the common case and color-correctness for
>> cases where precise color is desired.
>
> Gecko does this too (I think starting in Firefox 3.5?), but we got
> quite a few complaints about it, and I'd like to change it.
>
> It has the significant disadvantage that the relationships between
> colors in different parts of the same page can be different
> depending on the device (when a page has both tagged images and
> other colors).
>
> I think we should move towards treating CSS colors (and untagged
> images) as sRGB, as CSS1, CSS2.1, and css3-color require.

Long-term, we would like to do this in Safari (treat CSS colors and  
untagged images as sRGB). In our attempts so far, there have been two  
blockers:

1) Our attempts to do this so far have resulted in significant  
performance regressions. We're still working on a way to do this with  
good enough performance.

2) We have no way to get plugins to participate in colormatching. We  
need additions to NPAPI to tell plugins whether to use device color or  
sRGB, and we need plugins to adopt them. This is especially critical  
for Adobe Flash, since there are pages that try to match static  
background colors or background images to Flash. We've had some  
discussions on this.

Regards,
Maciej