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Why Many CSS Colors Have Goofy Names (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Take a look at the list of named colors within the CSS Color Module Level 4. The usual suspects are there, like 'red,' 'cyan,' and 'gold,' as well as some slightly more descriptive ones: 'lightgrey,' 'yellowgreen,' and 'darkslateblue.' But there are also some really odd names: 'burlywood,' 'dodgerblue,' 'blanchedalmond,' and more. An article at Ars walks through why these strange names became part of a CSS standard. Colors have been added to the standard piece by piece over the past 30 years — here's one anecdote: "The most substantial release, created by Paul Raveling, came in 1989 with X11R4. This update heralded a slew of light neutral tones, and it was a response to complaints from Raveling's coworkers about color fidelity. ... Raveling drew these names from an unsurprising source: the (now-defunct) paint company Sinclair Paints. It was an arbitrary move; after failing to receive sanctions from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which issued standards for Web color properties, Raveling decided to take matters into his own hands. He calibrated the colors for his own HP monitor. 'Nuts to ANSI & "ANSI standards,"' he complained."
by allowing user-defined colors in CSS. Not only could they offload the unwanted old names into a single stylesheet (legacycolors.css?), but it would be so much easier to adjust the color scheme of a website by changing a couple of definitions.
But I'm just an amateur; maybe that IS a CSS feature and I've missed it?
Dear patriarchal slimeballs who are making Slashdot a Toxic environment that is hostile to Womyn and other victim groups: We went through the list of color names and triggered on at least half of them.
Further, the very concept of segregating and discriminating based on the white male oppressive social-construct of "color" is patently offensive.
Censor this entire story in the name of SJ.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Because "slightlydarksalmon", "mauvelikepeach" or "bananawithahintofcinnamon" is soooo much more easy to understand then a bunch of hexadecimal numbers... And then they have the gall of accusing _us_ of talking an obscure lingo :-(
The company will be unhappy about having to clean their dime again...
it's just colors. better than rbg(255,255,255). They could fix this by changing the color names and just allow browsers to have legacy support for old color name but it really doesn't matter.
No one uses color names
It's all RGB these days
No one gives a shit
Burma Shave
Have any of you gone to a hardware or home improvement store? Lowe's or Home Depot? Do you recall the goofy names given to paint? There's your answer: CSS color names = paint color names!
...is Blanche Dalmond?
"dodgerblue" of course refers to the LA Dodgers. Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, the color itself is not used on the uniforms of the Dodgers but is used throughout the stadium. Personally I pictured more of a darker blue than an azure because I assumed it was the color found on the uniforms, but I immediately made the connection between the color name and the baseball team.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I believe all of these color names existed in CSS Level 3 or earlier except for `rebeccapurple` which actually has a very touching story: http://codepen.io/trezy/post/honoring-a-great-man
Back from a million years ago, I remember that color names used within X were similarly named. Wouldn't it make sense that the CSS standards came down from this?
These colors existed before the web, no? Weren't they the same as in X Windows?
Results of a similar XKCD color survey: https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/
Design by committee generally yields something meant to appease everyone, but usually winds up despised by all.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If you read the summary:
The most substantial release, created by Paul Raveling, came in 1989 with X11R4
Yep. And I have macros here (dating to the prior millennium) for things like xterm -bg navajowhite -fg midnightblue, etcaetera. Some things don't need changing.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
'nuff said.
Have gnu, will travel.
Warning: none of us outside US of A knows WTF you're talking about.
Gridiron is second only to AFL or Gaellic Football for making people think "WTF is that?"
... for the same reason that genes tend to have "silly" (or arbitrary) names. hERG, a significant problem in drug design, refers to the "Human-Ether-a-go-go related gene".
Wooosh. THAT'S THE POINT.
If you don't know that nobody outside USA knows that MLB is baseball not gridiron then don't reply.
...color names are kind of pointless. I gather that outfits like Microsoft and tv makers have been developing standards with higher gamuts than sRGB and hopefully better fidelity rather than just overly saturated color. I would assume HTML 5.x is going to take advantage of those new standards if they aren't already. In the meantime, if you want a pretty good approximation of a particular color, express it as a 24 bit hexadecimal value instead of using an obscure name. Easy peasy.
TFA completely did not mention that chucknorris is a valid color (it's a shade of red); likewise, OprahWinfrey is blue, MrT is black, and BarackObama is a faded green. (And yes, those are defined by the standard, they're not browser quirks.)
I looked into this once, and found that one is a UK convention and the the other a US convention (gray).
Table-ized A.I.
These are great for us technical folks.
I'm a systems engineer; when I'm doing a new web-site, I just go to http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-colo..., and select one of the fancy names, and see how it looks.
If it doesn't match with the rest of the colour scheme or just looks off, I scroll the list until I see another colour and name that I like.
Better than in the old days where you had to use hex number or a palette, plus with these fancy names, you can be guaranteed that the colours would be consistent and at least somewhat maintainable.
I don't know why we have 3 different client-side languages: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Why not unite them? HTML (or XML) can define styles, and even be a scripting language, similar to ColdFusion (but with better use of attributes). We could then use some programming to get better factoring or control of styles etc.
Some suggest Lisp, but I have to agree Lisp is just too hard to read if the author is not really careful. (Some seem to be born with "Lisp eyes". I'm not one of them.) XML can be verbose, but is generally easier to read than Lisp for most. The block end marker having the same name as the block starter seems to help readability and make it easier to fix textual mistakes.
Table-ized A.I.