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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 :-(
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
...is Blanche Dalmond?
Heck, I got better than that...Games Workshop model paints! So which do you want, Warpstone Glow, Stormvermin Fur, or Leadbelcher?
"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
These colors existed before the web, no? Weren't they the same as in X Windows?
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!
Next time you go, check out what the different paint manufacturers do with those color names....
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.
Except this was the opposite? The colors weren't designed by committee, they were organically grown over the decades(!!) by a handful of programmers who modified the X11 rgb.txt file. Then the CSS committee basically said "fuck it, we're not in the color business, nor do we want to pay big bucks to Pantone, so the free X11 rgb.txt file it is!"
The only people expected to actually use those color names are students working on demo pages. In the real world everyone just expects to see the hexadecimal triplets instead.
I read the internet for the articles.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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?"
"Flesh"?
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.
Some web browsers start using the color names for some reason that the article glosses over
I understood this to be a result of the leading browser at the time (Mosaic) being developed on Unix. You had to have Motif to compile it yourself, but there were binaries available for most popular Unixes. Most of them didn't come with Motif, although that was beginning to change.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What is 0x0FE911, quick? I have no good idea. Well, likely some light green but I've just made it up.
Now what's the color for caramel? ummm..
Human issues aside, while your proposition nets a technically unambiguous color (in some circumstances at that) every one's monitor is different and few people have it calibrated, so people would use wildly different numbers for the same intended color.
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.
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!
Next time you go, check out what the different paint manufacturers do with those color names....
Of course, they tell you that if you want more than one container of a specific defined color you probably would do well to mix the various containers together because even two batches spat out consecutively by their automated tinting machine won't be exactly the same. As you may also find if you have occasion to have some portion of your automobile repainted with the exact same color defined by the manufacturer, only to see that it is distinctly different. And not because the original has weathered, that's another issue.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.