Shades of Meaning
2003 June 19th 15:37
Just visited WebReference.com's page discussing the W3C CSS3 proposal to use a Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL) for descriptions of colour.
My first thought was "You've got to be joking. Getting rid of RGB hexadecimal notation". I have spent a lot of time studying that, getting to know how to adjust the value to get a lighter or darker colour. I thought computationally the proposal was more complex. The hardware would deal in RGB and the proposal deal with Hue (the frequency of the color), Saturation (how much gray is in the mix) and Lightness (how close to white is it). Obviously the conversion from HSL to RGB would take up some processor time.
In the end however, HSL can be a better way to represent colour. Graphic Designers, Photographers talk about colours in terms such as "warmth", "coolness" and "lightness". It therefore makes sense to have a notational system that is good at translating from an artists conception of colour to that of hardware. Perhaps this is a better way.
Lately I have been trying to play around with different shades of greens. The HSL notation might have been a better way to experiment. I am going to try and make some tools (Java or JavaScript/HTML - I am not sure yet). Stay tuned.
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