Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

The CSS color names are incredibly stupid. The colors they call “red”, “green”, “blue”, etc. are nowhere near the colors humans would consider closest to matching those labels, and combinations of basic CSS colors result in unusably ugly design.

More generally, color collections without any order or structure are terrible – that goes for Pantone, Crayola crayon colors, paint names at the hardware store, etc. These are great for vendor lock in, but useless for human understanding.

Instead colors should be specified in e.g. Munsell coordinates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system where the numbers are meaningful and intuitive.

And in the context of computers, the specification of color as RGB coordinates is fine for CPU-to-display communication, but ordinary people should never be forced to interact with it, as the dimensions of gamma-corrected RGB have very little relation to the structure of human color perception. Trivial shims over RGB such as HSL or HSV are not an acceptable alternative.

How is #FF0000 a poor choice for "red"? It's basically the definition.

Edit: and the color called "blue" in the image on top of the Munsell system wiki page is not blue, it's some shade of teal.

If you see "5P 5/10", you can figure out that's a medium shade of purple.

Whereas I don't think most people would have any idea what "#9966B6" would look like without looking it up.

Well, #ff0000 is the definition of "red" within the RGB colorspace, corresponding to the full brightness of the "red" (only) pixel components, constrained by your monitor's limited reproduction gamut.

So yeah, it's "red". But it's not the color of anything that has ever been viewed by humans in real life (except itself). There are few pure colors in nature anyway, but you can talk about "red" being wavelength of the center of the "reddish" range of the visible light spectrum.

Of course, names for colors are always subjective. Crayola might be the best universal reference. Crayola red bears little resemblance to #ff0000, even discounting the pigment vs. light mixing and perception differences.

But you have to call it something, right? So #ff0000 is "pure red, RGB, luminous". :)

The hue 5B in the Munsell system is not supposed to be some idealized “blue”. The “B” is just a mnemonic device: breaking the 100 hues which make up the full Munsell hue scale into 10 sections R, YR, Y, GY, G, BG, B, PB, P, and RP is a way of making the numbers a bit easier to remember than just a number from 0–100, but the precise boundaries of those categories are not in themselves meaningful. The whole point of the Munsell system is that you learn what color the hue number represents, and then it’s predictable, you don’t need to rely on someone’s arbitrary choice for each color term, or the specifics of some printer inks. The 100 hues are uniformly spaced with respect to human perception, and since human color categories are not organized in an orderly way relative to hue perception, it’s inevitable that any rigorously organized system won’t match up precisely with those categories.

As for RGB #FF0000, the “R” primary on a computer display is very orange-ish compared to what a human would call the unique hue “red”.

>The colors they call “red”, “green”, “blue”, etc. are nowhere near the colors humans would consider closest to matching those labels, and combinations of basic CSS colors result in unusably ugly design.

Is there even a standard for what people would say represents a given color? Color perception may very well have a cultural component to it. I know the perception of sound does have a cultural component because there are certain distinct sounds that, if not exposed to while really young, are effectively simplified into a single sound by the brain. The common example is the r and l sound among Japanese, but there is far more.

XKCD had a wonderful color survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

Plenty of good info there, but especially scrolling down to the color chart: http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_1024.png

Here's a pretty good attempt, using an online survey as the basis:

http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/

See also:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

A lot of research has actually been done on how humans and individuals perceive colors and tons of statistics exist. The results was the creation of many perceptual color spaces such as XYZ and CIE Lab that more closely match human perception axes of lightness, blueness and green-red-ness.

While it is true that our perception differs, we mostly share the same attributes close enough that we can fix standards (except for different cases of color blindness). For instance, we physically perceive blue, yellow, green and red as distinct colors and the rest is a mix of those (magenta being kind of a special case).

What we see as pure blue is actually a precise color point defined by how the eye physically perceive light. Reds, yellow and green are a little bit more fuzzy because they depend a lot on the ratio of red and green cones in our eyes so the brain is taking a little more liberty there.

The major difference between individuals is how precisely they can differentiate two similar colors.

I think the problem with CSS is they tried to qualify way too many colors with subjective terms instead of sticking to a clear and predictable system (either mathematic or designed), even if imperfect.

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