I never use color names (except if I quick want to set a color in CSS for testing purposes) so I wonder who is using color names and why?
Does all this has any real world implications?
I used to use them in both X11 and CSS way back in the day. They were really common in X11, because a lot of users were on pseudocolor displays and it made sense to reuse colors as much as possible.
If you used uncommon colors in your program on - for example - a Sparcstation 20, the palette would shift every time you moved the mouse in or out of your window. It's difficult to describe to someone that's never seen it, but it's unpleasant. No one mourns the death of pseudocolor.
On the CSS side, I sometimes use named colors as an anchor point. Like when writing a dark mode and thinking "that text might look good in yellowish" I set "amber", and the result was good enough to keep it. Other times it makes for a good challenge, limit your design options to only named colors to not get lost in the color wheel.
As a casual user and coder, I use them, because I don't know what #FF00FF or #00FFFF look like, but I do recognize magenta or cyan instantly. Though, support for hexcodes has become better in editors, so it's now a mixed experience.
As touched on in the article, the beauty of colour names would be that they’re celebrated for the machine.
#124356 might look different on one monitor or workstation compared to another.
Having colour names which are calibrated for the device makes a lot of sense. Assuming those colour names are actually calibrated, which as the article also mentions, so often wasn’t the case.
As an aside, this is a big problem in DTP where your display should match the page. However you obviously wouldn’t use colour names in that specific industry because you’re dealing with a vastly greater range of colours and shades.
Nitpick: you absolutely would use colour names in that industry - it's just that the colour names would be more along the lines of "Pantone 137C" than "Yellow".
In desktop publishing or other graphic arts where you are sending your files to pre-press for physical printing you would use CMYK or Pantone (for spot colours) + paper grade.
My guess? Most green things you see are a darker green. The extremely bright green (lime according to the W3C) is less useful, so they probably chose the color based on what they thought the user would expect.
Given that RGB is well-known, I suspect their assumption was wrong, but I have nothing to back that up.
Also, green is the brightest primary after accounting for typical human vision and typical monitors. The YUV formulas put at nearly twice as bright as red.
So a normal display has more green than you'd need, and 00ff00 green has terrible contrast against ffffff white
A #00ff00 green is gonna be much, much brighter and more intense than a #0000ff blue. If we call #0000ff "blue", it makes sense that the color called "green" should be of similar brightness/intensity to the color we call "blue".
Not that it's very consistent. The color called "red" is #ff0000, which looks brighter than both #008800 and #0000ff IMO. And arguably, "blue" shouldn't be #0000ff, since that's just not a very pleasent color. I think I might've been tempted to go with something like, red = #cc0000, green = #008800, blue = #0055ff. Or maybe go all the way and specify the colors in some perceptual color space rather than using RGB. But oh well.
(The color #0000ff for "blue" is super over used IMO. Most terminal emulators default to it as well and it just makes blue text hard to read in most out-of-the-box configurations. To get a nice blue color, you need some green in there.)
The naming is supposed to make sense for humans, not machines. Technically the "greenest green" from a technical POV is #00FF00, but the humans understanding of "green" is something more like #008000.
In Unity3D Game Engine, "Yellow" as a named color is not #ffff00 but #ffeb04, the documentation says "RGBA is (1, 0.92, 0.016, 1), but the color is nice to look at!". I bet this bit the ass of thousands of developers that used it assuming it would be #ffff00 and then wondering why the output color somewhere was wrong.
This comes from the original HTML 3.2 spec (1996) which defined 16 colors matching the Windows VGA palette, where pure #00FF00 was deemed too bright for general use, so they chose the more muted #008000 for "green" and later kept it for backward compatibility.
Readit News
If you used uncommon colors in your program on - for example - a Sparcstation 20, the palette would shift every time you moved the mouse in or out of your window. It's difficult to describe to someone that's never seen it, but it's unpleasant. No one mourns the death of pseudocolor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATMVrHfrus8
#124356 might look different on one monitor or workstation compared to another.
Having colour names which are calibrated for the device makes a lot of sense. Assuming those colour names are actually calibrated, which as the article also mentions, so often wasn’t the case.
As an aside, this is a big problem in DTP where your display should match the page. However you obviously wouldn’t use colour names in that specific industry because you’re dealing with a vastly greater range of colours and shades.
Dead Comment
How did it happen?
Given that RGB is well-known, I suspect their assumption was wrong, but I have nothing to back that up.
So a normal display has more green than you'd need, and 00ff00 green has terrible contrast against ffffff white
just like everything in SW development in the last 10 years. SW is supposed to be an engineering discipline, not a witchcraft.
Not that it's very consistent. The color called "red" is #ff0000, which looks brighter than both #008800 and #0000ff IMO. And arguably, "blue" shouldn't be #0000ff, since that's just not a very pleasent color. I think I might've been tempted to go with something like, red = #cc0000, green = #008800, blue = #0055ff. Or maybe go all the way and specify the colors in some perceptual color space rather than using RGB. But oh well.
(The color #0000ff for "blue" is super over used IMO. Most terminal emulators default to it as well and it just makes blue text hard to read in most out-of-the-box configurations. To get a nice blue color, you need some green in there.)
That claim feels wrong. Colours are a concept on the level of the culture, not on the level of the species.
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