“Tomato” versus “#FF6347” – the tragicomic history of CSS color names

That's why I love Bootstrap.

   margin: 0 auto;

Unless there's a new html element or css trick I'm unaware of? (like the `<center>` of old)?

really? to me it seems to work very well. When I compare it to doing layouts in desktop apps such as winforms or WPF, CSS is amazing. I am no expert in it, but 99% of the time it more than meets my needs and I love how I can easily override other websites styles with something like stylebot. Seems like your experience is 100% opposite. What would be a good solution in place of CSS ?

What don't they have to do with it? CSS is all about defining the way the site looks. Animations, and especially transitions between states, is the exact same thing. Animations are just layout plus time.

It didn't work that well for applications or multi-element "content sites", but now with Flexbox it mostly does, and it continues to get better.

Huh? Do you not remember/know what it was like to style webpages with FONT elements before CSS? CSS was a godsend. That was the separating content from presentation breakthrough.

The problem for which it existed wasn't layout. CSS1 (1996) didn't even have anything in it for layout.

>- About Tables: 15 years ago everybody switche to tabless layouts for the purpose of separating markup from presentation.

Using tables for layout was the original hack. Likewise using floats to avoid it was also a hack. Neither of those features were designed for those purposes. You can possibly blame the CSS standard for being incomplete, but you can't blame it for designers creating elaborate hacks out of it.

> A few years later we got access to the table display mode in CSS because, well, not a single one from the other solution worked well to build layout. Qo we got offered the option to emulate html tables in CSS.

You make it sound like table display was added after the failure of other layout methods. Not so - table display was there right from the beginning when CSS first added layout (CSS2 in 1998). It was IEs failure to implement it for nearly a decade that meant nobody was aware of or could use it for many years.

I don't agree with this. CSS is a warty tool with a mixed background, but modern CSS is pretty effective and pleasant to use, especially when combined with a preprocessor.

A broken box model

The W3C box is counter-intuitive, but bear in mind that nobody really expected CSS to be used for layout at the point it was initially selected, so I doubt it was considered that important. And in any case, it's fixed now, with box-sizing supported by like 98% of browsers globally.

Centering things? You have to use hacks even for this simple purpose.

No you don't. There are well-documented, consistent ways to centre in CSS. Vertical entering used to be difficult (for obvious reasons), but now we've got flexbox which solves that problem entirely.

Building grids? Let's have fun and pick the one you prefer

These all do different things and have different characteristics – so you can pick the one that most suited.

Qo we got offered the option to emulate html tables in CSS.

Not quite – we got the ability to build visually-table-like things that use table layout rules, but separated them from the semantic implication of tables. That's a good thing.

They added CSS animations. What animations have to do with styling and layout?

Animations are just the time axis of layout. It makes much more sense to define them and the transitions between them declaratively using CSS.

Etc, etc, etc. CSS is just a complete mess.

In contrast, I find that CSS is mostly a bit of a scapegoat. Sure, it's taken a while to become a comprehensive layout and styling tool – but combined with something like SASS, I absolutely love writing CSS.

To be fair, that was solved a while ago with flexbox, which now has next to universal adoption. If youre targeting a browser that doesn't support flexbox, you're going to have a lot of other hacks in place as well.

The initial stage of CSS was to provide an alternative to presentational HTML (font tags, bgcolor attribute etc.) by supporting at least the equal presentational power in a style sheet language. Since HTML already had color names, CSS also needed them in order to allow easy porting of style information from HTML to CSS.

Besides this guy is associated with even more failed projects than CSS color names, such as XHTML2, XForms, and RDFa.

The IE5.5 border-box box model issues happened because the CSS box model was so strange they assumed it was a mistake in the spec.

From what I understand it's pretty popular with corporate marketing because it takes the hassle out of getting extremely consistent colors across different physical and digital media.

The issue with defining physical colour codes is that it gets really complicated when you consider finish. With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have. With paints and plastics the finish (how glossy the surface is, how metallic it is, coated or uncoated, inclusions like metal flake, etc) really messes things up. This tends to "break" systems like Pantone, and means that it's really hard to choose a few variables to absolutely define a color.

I have bought different brands based on perceived/researched quality. I've found personal/anecdotal differences in how well paint coats, how runny it is, how well it holds up, using different brands.

There's no denying physical paint brings additional complexities. The paint's exact recipe will change the interactions with the surface, the thickness of the layers and how the paint ages, all of which (and the painted surface itself) influence the final color and how it evolves. And then each color can come in a variety of finishes.

You could define a standard measuring device and a standard light source and white and black balance but then you'll have two paints that measure #F00 but aren't guaranteed to at all look the same color to the human eye in varying natural light conditions. If you got really sophisticated and defined color as a graph of wavelength to albedo then you'd probably just end up where we already are of "Cherry (brand A)" and "Cherry (brand B)" because it's post-facto and not prescriptive (and still wouldn't account for specular vs diffuse reflection).

Says the author: "I have no opinion about whether it should be used to build a new X11 rgb.txt except that seems like the transition would be a huge headache."

Is there even a standard for what people would say represents a given color? Color perception may very well have a cultural component to it. I know the perception of sound does have a cultural component because there are certain distinct sounds that, if not exposed to while really young, are effectively simplified into a single sound by the brain. The common example is the r and l sound among Japanese, but there is far more.

Edit: and the color called "blue" in the image on top of the Munsell system wiki page is not blue, it's some shade of teal.

It would likely be best to define your own list of named colours, for localisation reasons if nothing else, but for the initial version of a feature I could see using the CSS colour names directly.

I'll take this as a data point that the repost invite experiment is working, i.e. is helping to reduce the randomness of what gets noticed here.