[HN Gopher] Color Formats in CSS
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       Color Formats in CSS
        
       Author : samwillis
       Score  : 178 points
       Date   : 2022-12-30 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.joshwcomeau.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.joshwcomeau.com)
        
       | mark-r wrote:
       | I don't remember hearing the story behind "rebeccapurple", that
       | was a touching link to include.
        
       | muxxa wrote:
       | 3 digit hex values are also handy for prototyping, e.g. #c40 for
       | an orange, or #ccc for a light gray
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | gherkinnn wrote:
       | I truly admire the consistent care Josh puts in to his work.
       | 
       | The great content and didactics aside, it is the bomb proof
       | interactive elements that do it for me. More often than not,
       | sliders don't work on phones and/or break scrolling. Not here.
        
         | lghh wrote:
         | Whatever the opposite of web dev blog spam is, Josh is the
         | poster child for it. He could easily not add the interactive
         | elements and his content would still be well written and
         | informative, but instead he goes all in on everything he does.
         | I really hope he is making a full time career of of this,
         | because if anyone deserves to it's him. I am grateful for how
         | much I've learned from his blog and course.
        
         | entropie wrote:
         | It changes my scroll behaviour and I hate that. I instantly
         | close sites that do that.
         | 
         | Edit: I use brave and removed every smoothing from my
         | scrolling.
        
         | weego wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | samwillis wrote:
           | That's a horribly dismissive comment. If you don't find
           | something interesting or of value to you on HN just don't
           | comment.
           | 
           | Suggesting that css, colour models and colour spaces is a
           | shallow topic shows a compleat misunderstanding of the topic.
        
       | Aardwolf wrote:
       | > If so, it likely means that your monitor or browser doesn't
       | support wide-gamut color formats. You might have better luck
       | checking on your mobile device!
       | 
       | Does this work on Android for anyone? I tried in chrome on a
       | Pixel 6a, and the two red squares look identical to me.
       | 
       | The only display color setting I found in the android setting was
       | a choice between "natural", "boosted" or "adaptive" but none
       | worked, and I found no settings like "sRGB" or "P3" for screen.
       | Any other setting I may be missing?
        
         | alwillis wrote:
         | > Does this work on Android for anyone? I tried in chrome on a
         | Pixel 6a, and the two red squares look identical to me.
         | 
         | The Pixel 6a hardware doesn't support DCI-P3 Wide Color Gamut;
         | the last Pixel to support this was the 4 XL [1].
         | 
         | Even if your hardware supported DCI-P3, browser support is
         | required; mobile Chrome doesn't support it yet and it's still
         | behind a flag on desktop Chrome, according to Can I Use.[2]
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://www.epey.co.uk/phone/e/YToyOntpOjU7YToxOntpOjA7czo2O...
         | 
         | [2]: https://caniuse.com/css-color-function
        
         | moozeek wrote:
         | Works for me on a 2018 Moto w stock Android 10. My color
         | options are (translated) natural, boosted and saturated, w
         | saturated active. Seems to be the factory default.
        
       | chiefalchemist wrote:
       | > Unlike with Sass variables/functions, which compile away into
       | hardcoded values, CSS variables are dynamic. We can tweak any of
       | these values using JavaScript, and all the other ones will
       | automatically update.
       | 
       | Might someone share a link - with a high signal to noise ratio -
       | to a CodePen or tutorial that demos / gives examples of this?
       | Perhaps some use cases as well?
       | 
       | I'm intrigued, but not experienced enough to know the best
       | place(s) to start.
        
         | alwillis wrote:
         | I explained why "we" (web developers) should want CSS custom
         | properties (also known as CSS variables) versus Sass-style
         | variables a couple of weeks ago when the CSS Working Group
         | asked for feedback on nesting syntax.
         | 
         | I included a couple of links to high signal-to-noise ratio
         | articles on the advantages and use cases of CSS variables [1].
         | 
         | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019907
        
       | albert_e wrote:
       | Offtopic:
       | 
       | I loved the cartoon character on the website.
       | 
       | He popped up on one side when I was in the middle of the article
       | and said "Hope I did not startle you. May I interest you in my
       | newsletter?". I said "No thanks" and he went away.
       | 
       | And when I reached the end of the article, there he was again --
       | sitting on a small mound, and waiting patiently for me to finish
       | reading and get there eventually.
       | 
       | Somehow it felt very "natural" that he would wait for me at the
       | end -- knowing I would meet him there again, just in case if he
       | could be of any help.
       | 
       | Loved the little touch. Not sure if the author/designer meant it
       | this way though.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | worldmerge wrote:
       | You always have such nice posts Josh!
        
       | LordDragonfang wrote:
       | Slightly off topic, but whenever I see talk about perceptually-
       | uniform color, I'm reminded of this classic post about graphing
       | library colormaps:
       | 
       | http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-col...
       | 
       | (which also links to
       | https://matplotlib.org/2.0.2/users/colormaps.html)
        
       | espo wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | LordDragonfang wrote:
         | Was this comment written by ChatGPT? Because it has the same
         | level of casual tautology (The first sentence especially; "the
         | reason it's lighter is because defined that way") and
         | confidently incorrect information.
         | 
         | The whole gray/dark gray thing has practically nothing to do
         | with sRGB, it's an artifact of one being an X11 color and one
         | not.
        
           | karlshea wrote:
           | I assumed the same when I read it, it reads like an SEO spam
           | blog post.
        
       | velcrovan wrote:
       | HSL came in clutch when I designed my website
       | (https://joeldueck.com) to change colors based on the outside
       | temperature. (See the slider at the bottom)
       | 
       | A script maps the temperature in degf to a value between 0 and
       | 360, and this value is used for the Hue paramater in CSS hsl()
       | colors.
        
       | berkut wrote:
       | Picky, but:
       | 
       | > 140 colors just isn't enough--it's even less than the 8-bit
       | color palette available on the original NES console
       | 
       | Is incorrect, as the NES didn't support 8-bit color... From
       | Wikipedia:
       | 
       | "the console can display up to 25 colors simultaneously out of 54
       | usable colors"
        
         | onion2k wrote:
         | That's not quite true. The NES could reregister colors in the
         | middle of a scanline to get additional colors up to 410
         | onscreen at once. https://ahefner.livejournal.com/11670.html
         | 
         | I doubt any games used this though.
        
           | dspillett wrote:
           | Ah, memories of playing with similar tricks to do split-
           | screen modes on BBC computers. Did it myself for a display
           | when I wanted the full 8 colours1 for an image (I was drawing
           | fractal things) but decent resolution text for the display of
           | parameters at the bottom.
           | 
           | Some games did this to great effect, like Elite which had
           | mode 4 (mid res, mono) on top for the ship view and mode 5
           | (low res, 4 colour) for the controls [or in the version
           | enhanced for the extra capability of the BBC Master, mode 1
           | (mid res 4 colour) & mode 2 (low res 8 colour1)]. There was
           | one driving game that didn't flip modes but did flip pallets
           | to get more than 4 colours on a mode 1 screen display and
           | that even loaded some code into a strip of the display memory
           | that always shows blue sky (just setting all the pallet
           | entries to blue so the data wasn't visible).
           | 
           | I don't think the technique was fast enough on those machines
           | to work more granularly than per row (or per few rows)
           | though, so no expanding the pallet over the space of one scan
           | line.
           | 
           | --
           | 
           | [1] The BBC supported a mode with 16 pallet entries, but only
           | 8 colours as the other 8 were used for flashing pairs, and
           | those 8 were fixed as the standard primary mixes2 instead of
           | anything more flexible
           | 
           | [2] You could change what colours mapped to each pallet entry
           | though - I once saw an attempt to get more colours by
           | flipping the pallet between two options each screen refresh,
           | essentially temporal dithering like some LCD panels did to
           | fake 8-bit colour from a 6-bit panel, this actually worked
           | but was too flickery to be really useful though.
        
       | ergonaught wrote:
       | The "named colors" example of darkgray being "lighter" than gray
       | disrupted my reading, because darkgray is obviously and
       | significantly darker than gray on my system.
        
         | enlyth wrote:
         | Do you by any chance use a browser extension like DarkReader?
         | This is what I noticed as well but after disabling it the
         | behaviour reversed
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | methyl wrote:
         | Odd, what display do you use?
        
       | Eric_WVGG wrote:
       | Why is it that Safari gets dragged for not supporting an endless
       | rabbit hole of "web app" standards, and nobody cares that Chrome
       | and Firefox haven't found the time to get P3 color working in
       | five or six years?
        
         | ovao wrote:
         | An overly-simplistic explanation may be that most engineers
         | don't care about "how red a red is", whereas most _designers_
         | are super interested in their reds being very red.
         | 
         | Both camps can be very vocal, but most of us probably hover
         | around other engineers and sparingly around designers.
        
       | wildrhythms wrote:
       | Another fun resource for browsing the built-in colors:
       | https://enes.in/sorted-colors/
       | 
       | And discussion from when it was posted on HN:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503572
        
       | misterS wrote:
       | That's a really nifty visualisation of the 140 named web colors.
        
         | therealcamino wrote:
         | I thought so too. Clicking around, I had a hunch when I saw
         | "lightseagreen" that these were the old X11 colors, and went
         | looking for "lemonchiffon" to confirm it. (From the text though
         | it sounds like there are other sources as well.)
        
       | 11235813213455 wrote:
       | I don't like when color pickers have a square area, it looks
       | confusing. If you have a triangle it's probably clearer, for
       | example with hwb one corner is for white, another for black,
       | another for the pure color. It works for other 3D color models
       | like hsl https://caub.github.io/color-wheel/build/
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-30 23:01 UTC)