[CREATE] Color swatches

[Jon A. Cruz]

On Apr 6, 2008, at 8:16 AM, Olivier BERTEN wrote:

> The name and space attributes shouldn't be mandatory. A color  
> doesn't need a name to come into a palette and many palettes are  
> just a arbitrary "geometrical" division of the possibilities of  
> color model. When you have #003399 in a palette, it's not because  
> it looks like anything in real life, it's just because its  
> neighbors are #003366 and #0033CC. It just shows different  
> possibilities of RGB, whether you're using sRGB or AdobeRGB doesn't  
> matter.

The point on space is one I would argue needs to stay.

A large reason for much of this collaboration effort was because  
programmers had become sloppy with color and what exactly "RGB"  
meant. For end users, it actually does matter significantly if they  
think they're using sRGB or AdobeRGB. Ask any professionals who have  
been working for any period of time and they should be able to tell  
you stories of contracts gone wrong or jobs blowing out of scope due  
to color mismatches. Even the classic PC vs. Mac gamma difference is  
a big issue. (Oh, and color issues are the #1 reason for return of  
items from online sales).

Also... when I've seen people with #003399 in a palette, it is  
because it *does* look like something in real life. It looks like  
something specific on the monitor they are sitting at in real life,  
and often will be compared to the customer's logo sample held in the  
graphic designer's hand right next to his monitor. Then again, one of  
the common problem scenarios is with a graphic designer sitting at  
Mac with a nice Apple monitor doing the work and then who ends up  
with a customer review of an executive sitting on a PC looking at the  
website the designer created on his Mac.


For the cases where values don't matter so much and it has been  
defined that sRGB is close enough, just say that sRGB is the  
colorspace involved. Anything else really needs one to state what the  
rgb values are expected to be, otherwise things end up completely  
undefined and a mess.

If you look at the colour file format draft, you'll see that the  
colorspace attribute is not required for sRGB colors. For many cases  
the "dunno, some values from 0 through 255" colors have be  
retroactively defined to use sRGB and that is 'close enough'. For any  
use other that "close enough" applications, a colorspace really needs  
to be defined, and thus the 'space' attribute is required for those.
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