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Comment by drewmate | Hacker News Reader

In case the named web colors aren't enough, we're making excellent progress naming every color in the RGB space.

This is absolutely deranged and I love it.

It would be interesting to have goals or visualize tiers by number of significant bits of the individual color components.

I remember that! I participated a bit, it was pretty fun

Welp, this ate my time. Fun. Cool.

I've used this a lot actually and appreciate it exists but I have a lot of issues. First of all is how much it's used for memeing and coming up with funny sounding names for certain colors. There are also many professional color palette names. Some, like CSS named colors, are very well-represented. Others like Wikipedia's list of named colors[0] draw from various sources. Then there's others that might be historically important[1] but little known otherwise. But basically anything outside of CSS named colors, Crayola, and Pantone is completely ignored. There have been many instances where I've seen major color-naming bodies (e.g. ISCC or the Federal Standard 595C) all agree that some color name is mapped to a certain color but the users of colornames.org have just completely ignored it and come up with a new color for it. How do we name new colors without ignoring names that have already been assigned?

My second major issue is how deeply susceptible it is to cultural biases. Wikipedia handles the issue of constantly changing knowledge/culture by stating that its mission is to capture knowledge "as it currently" exists.

I'd like to see a version of the colornames scores where votes are weighed by recency. Older votes can still count, but in order to capture constantly changing/adapting culture and emerging consensuses we can maybe weigh more recent votes more heavily

Another thing I'd love to see is to just have accounts answer the question: "Which language have you spoken the most of in the past (7) years of your life?" I think this one simple data point can solve a LOOOT of the issues and captures both culture and heritage without having to differentiate between place of birth, changing life circumstances and upbringings, etc. This would also mean that people who speak Tagalog don't have to see their well-agreed-upon name for a color being overwritten by the norms of demographic majority of the userbase which skews English-speakers

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Clearly I have a lot of thoughts haha. I still love that color-names exists. One thing I'd like to build out some day is something to aggregate all the different color naming schemes out there and have colornames.org simply be a source amongst many others. Similar projects already exist[2] but none that are explicit about being attempt to aggregate sources and not BE the ultimate word on what color is named what

.. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_colors

.. [1] https://github.com/davo/Color-Standards-and-Color-Nomenclatu...

.. [2] https://github.com/meodai/color-names

Which RGB space?

8-bit? and then which bit-8? the "2 bits for blue" 8-bit?

Or 16-bit? 24-bit? 32-bit? Using floats or not?

The one that everyone and their grandmother uses to pick screen colors: 8bits per channel, integer.

To be fair there's a point here, which is that color spaces from sRGB to DCI-P3 to REC2020 do have quite different color/tone/brightness ranges (gamuts). Old windows boxes (and old monitors) also displayed them very differently (especially the low brightness ones). Macs were much better, and that made picking colors on them far more repeatable.

Now everyone in Windows world has standardized on sRGB and Mac on DCI-P3, but mobile is more important, where I believe it's still split sRGB Android, and DCI iPhone.

I don't know, but expect that HTML picked sRGB for their color space since this is the one people historically meant. I'd be surprised that it wasn't configurable and there weren't multiple versions, because why have a standard, when you can choose!

We won't even get into HDR, automatic brightness/eye-saver, or white point adjustment. You'ld be better off looking for a color perception scale rather than display scale, if you wanted to avoid that. Environmental lighting has big effects on perception though.

just fyi they're adding support for different color spaces to css

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