Why Many CSS Colors Have Goofy Names (arstechnica.com) 77
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."
They could fix everything (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Re:They could fix everything (Score:4, Funny)
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I have to admit I would like to see Less SASS on websites...
And less backtalk, too!
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Cause that would be nice...
Re:They could fix everything (Score:5, Informative)
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;
}
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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
Web Languages of the World, Unite! (Score:2)
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
SJW Filter needed (Score:1, Flamebait)
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)
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 :-(
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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?"
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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)
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)
No one uses color names
It's all RGB these days
No one gives a shit
Burma Shave
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#FFFFE7
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Heck, I got better than that...Games Workshop model paints! So which do you want, Warpstone Glow, Stormvermin Fur, or Leadbelcher?
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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....
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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
So who... (Score:3)
...is Blanche Dalmond?
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She's a bit nutty. [about.com]
Some not so odd (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than rebeccapurple... (Score:1)
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
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If you read the summary:
The most substantial release, created by Paul Raveling, came in 1989 with X11R4
My xterms use them... (Score:2)
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.
CSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
These colors existed before the web, no? Weren't they the same as in X Windows?
Re:CSS? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Why google when /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt exists?
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Remember kids, computers did not exist until Tim Berners Lee invented them so that his browser had somewhere to run.
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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?"
The TL;DR (Score:1)
Design by committee generally yields something meant to appease everyone, but usually winds up despised by all.
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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)
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.
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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.
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"Flesh"?
Just remember ... (Score:2)
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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. >.>
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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
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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.
Gray versus grey (Score:3, Informative)
I looked into this once, and found that one is a UK convention and the the other a US convention (gray).
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That's a gray area :-)
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Although grey is slightly more common in the UK, and gray in the US, both are used pretty frequently in both places.
These are great for programmers (Score:1)
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