Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

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Might work as a joke but several of those colors will be indistinguishable to human eye, yet have completely different crowd-sourced names.

Or - could you ever tell the difference between "Amateur Rockstar Bright Pink" (#ff1aab) and "Pink Soul Of Heart" (#ff1bab) even if your life depended on it?

The fact that 24-bit RGB can represent 16 million colors does not mean our vision is capable of telling such number of colors apart from each other. Creating a coherent and concise naming system for all them could be an interesting (and perhaps quite challenging) technical task, but I don't believe crowd-sourcing those will yield any usable results. Or - how many colors with "poop" in their name do you think is acceptable? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=po...

And how about "asdf" (the first four letters on the home row of a QWERTY keyboard - an age-old internet troll version of "foobar")? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=as...

Look at the bigger picture: given the data is open, if you wanted a solid depiction of what colour best represents "poop" you could average those results.

The non-joke use case could be memorizing / communicating bunch of colors. Those human readable names are lot easier to remember than hex values.

Not sure if "Asdfgtyuhijokl'" is easier to memorize than #33-51-B5 .. :) https://colornames.org/color/3351b5

The problem with anything crowd-sourced is always that without moderation the results are garbage, and moderation is generally expensive or at least requires passionate volunteers. Crowd-sourcing 16 million unique color names is bound to be problematic and very difficult to moderate.

I actually gave this a second thought as a technical problem. The CSS defines 140 color names. It would probably not be infeasible to crowd-source / invent 4,096 base color names spread out exactly evenly across the 3-dimensional RGB space (e.g. "maroon", "deep sky blue", "slate gray" and so on.) If we could then further name 64 "tints" (like "reddish", "dark bluish", "purple hazed"), one could express about 250,000 colors with base color + tint pairs (like "reddish deep sky blue" or "purple hazed maroon"). This should be already sufficient for expressing almost all colors normally needed for UI designs etc.

If even more fidelity was somehow desired, one could then add one more of the 64 tints from the same vocabulary with some qualifier, like 'slightly'. So e.g. "slighly purple hazed dark bluish slate gray". This system could express the full RGB space, and there would be always possibility to find a closeby very similar color with shorter name - e.g. "slight dark bluish reddish deep sky blue" => "reddish deep sky blue" => "deep sky blue".

You mean ”Easy To Remeber Blue”?

Joking aside I agree with you that it is useless to name 16 million colors but I appreciate the futile effort.

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