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."

Comments

Re:They could fix everything

[Fwipp]

You could check out something like SASS: allows variables & some other syntax improvements, then compiles into CSS. So you can declare:

$primary-color: #abcdef;
div.header {
    background-color: $primary-color;
}

Re:CSS?

[drinkypoo]

These colors existed before the web, no? Weren't they the same as in X Windows?

Yeah, that's what the summary almost says. You can google for rgb.txt to see more.

Re:The TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Semi-short article summary:

X11 programmers decide that people want "easy" names because hex codes are hard. These were specifically calibrated for the DEC VT24's screen.

Later, an X11 programmer's colleagues start complaining about lacking color options in X11 (it turns out, someone does think hex codes are hard), so he adds a bunch of colors based off paint swatch names. Later that year, another programmer adds a bunch more colors with silly subjective names taken from Crayola crayons, after figuring that the use of "standard" names like "pink" or "orange" is a bad idea since monitors are calibrated wildly differently, while no one's really going to complain if "orchid" doesn't look like "orchid" on their monitor.

Much time passes. Some web browsers start using the color names for some reason that the article glosses over, but almost no websites do and it's not part of the standards. For CSS 3, W3C decides to respect that practice by codifying the colors despite much protest and little support. More time passes, someone adds a color as a memorial to the daughter of a CSS-related programmer (not sure what that means...) who had died of brain cancer.

And today? No one's actually using the damn things, everyone uses hex codes, but they're still there.

That's it. Lots of hand-waving, kind of scant details, and nothing much in the way of committees until w3c got involved.

Gray versus grey

[Tablizer]

In 1988, X11R2 arrived with the addition of three colors, including the identical shades "gray" and "grey." According to Austin-based developer Alex Sexton, discussing the colors at a JavaScript Conference last year, programmers at Hewlett-Packard couldn't remember the proper spelling (which was originally with an 'a'). Including two names, it was thought, would prevent errors.

I looked into this once, and found that one is a UK convention and the the other a US convention (gray).