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GUI Graphics The Internet

Why Many CSS Colors Have Goofy Names (arstechnica.com) 77

Posted by Soulskill from the what-exactly-is-mediumorchid dept.
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."
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Why Many CSS Colors Have Goofy Names More

Why Many CSS Colors Have Goofy Names

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  • They could fix everything (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LihTox ( 754597 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @11:46AM (#50710727)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:They could fix everything (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fwipp ( 1473271 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @12:06PM (#50710939)

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

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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      CSS Variables have been an often requested feature that has fallen on deaf ears.
      CSS variables, ACTUAL inheritance and not this bullshit system we currently have, and templating. They'd all make make CSS so much better.
      Equally the ability to completely remove every inherited attribute to save having to do stupid CSS resets. (I think that is getting added though)

      Such simple features that could make working with CSS considerably easier.
      But the "structure-style-interactivity" wanks have done everything to attac

    • 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 i

  • 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.

  • Why names at all? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by johannesg ( 664142 )

    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 :-(

    • 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 :-(

      how about shartreuse? and no, I didn't typo or misspell.

  • who care? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @12:13PM (#50711015)

    No one uses color names
    It's all RGB these days
    No one gives a shit
    Burma Shave

  • So who... (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @12:18PM (#50711057)

    ...is Blanche Dalmond?

  • Some not so odd (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @12:24PM (#50711121)
    "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.

  • Other than rebeccapurple... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • CSS? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @12:47PM (#50711367)

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

    • Re:CSS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday October 12, 2015 @01:45PM (#50712031) Homepage Journal

      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: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why google when /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt exists?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jrumney ( 197329 )
          Or Google whether ANSI was really in charge of issuing Web color standards in 1989.

          • Remember kids, computers did not exist until Tim Berners Lee invented them so that his browser had somewhere to run.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      The summary says, paraphrasing, that he made them in 1989 for X11R4 despite the anti-web organization ANSI trying to block it. I never heard of that browser though, so I don't know if we can trust the summary.

      • This is why it's such a weird article/summary. The web didn't even exist in 1989. The color table has so extremely little relationship to CSS. Plus the majority of Slashdot should have known of X Windows already and have probably seen similar tables of colors for decades. So the article feels vaguely patronizing and/or dumbed down, as if it were a kids program entitled "why do new standards borrow from old standards?"

  • Design by committee generally yields something meant to appease everyone, but usually winds up despised by all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      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 tr

      • Re:The TL;DR (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12, 2015 @02:48PM (#50712601)

        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.

        • 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.

  • ... fuchsia is just gay for purple.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neminem ( 561346 )

      I read that as, "fuschia is mostly straight, but is attracted to purple anyway, despite both being male", which is far more entertaining a parse than what was meant.

      There's probably already a rule 34 of that out there somewhere, anthropomorphized abstract concepts of colors screwing. >.>

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by locoluis ( 69948 )

      No.

      Fuchsia is the name of a flower, named after German botanist Leonard Fuchs. It's also the name for a specific subset of purple, fully saturated and roughly halfway between red and blue.

      Magenta is essentially the same color; it was named so to celebrate the the French and Sardinian Army victory at the Battle of Magenta near the Italian town of the same name.

      Purple is the name for the set of colors between red and either violet or blue depending on who you ask. Either way, it's a larger set of colors.

      And a

  • Gray versus grey (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday October 12, 2015 @11:29PM (#50715499) Journal

    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).

  • 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... [w3.org], 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

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