Show HN: A color picker for named web colors (arantius.github.io)

It is a Voronoi diagram (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/VoronoiDiagram.html) where each point is a web color as it would be positioned on a full hue-saturation color wheel.

    // Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/54522007/91238 .
    // I've tweaked it to spread out some of the colors (especially they greys)
    // that don't fit well into a true H/S wheel.
    let colorRadius = (s + v/5)*0.75 * radius;
    let colorAngle = h/360 * 2 * Math.PI;

Specifically, in renderWheel() at c.setAttribute('points', points), Safari balks at the assignment and says it cannot parse the value it's been given. Perhaps the terminal comma isn't supported? (Chrome complains about it but proceeds.)

Yup, it's due to the fact that we perceive green as much brighter.

It's actually very interesting to look at "constant luminance color wheels" which correct for this perceptually:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralph_Redden/publicatio...

https://i.stack.imgur.com/f4n0P.png

What we traditionally call "yellow" isn't even present, it becomes more like "khaki" or "olive".

  Funny to me that how... #00FF00 is Lime... what we actually refer as Green in daily life is close to #008000

And that "limegreen" (#32CD32) is a third, distinct color name.

cornflowerblue? That's happy little mistake in the making.

Is there a Bob Ross for websites/apps (or general programming) somewhere out there on Youtube or Twitch?

Which RGB space?

8-bit? and then which bit-8? the "2 bits for blue" 8-bit?

Or 16-bit? 24-bit? 32-bit? Using floats or not?

I remember that! I participated a bit, it was pretty fun

This is absolutely deranged and I love it.

It would be interesting to have goals or visualize tiers by number of significant bits of the individual color components.

I've used this a lot actually and appreciate it exists but I have a lot of issues. First of all is how much it's used for memeing and coming up with funny sounding names for certain colors. There are also many professional color palette names. Some, like CSS named colors, are very well-represented. Others like Wikipedia's list of named colors[0] draw from various sources. Then there's others that might be historically important[1] but little known otherwise. But basically anything outside of CSS named colors, Crayola, and Pantone is completely ignored. There have been many instances where I've seen major color-naming bodies (e.g. ISCC or the Federal Standard 595C) all agree that some color name is mapped to a certain color but the users of colornames.org have just completely ignored it and come up with a new color for it. How do we name new colors without ignoring names that have already been assigned?

My second major issue is how deeply susceptible it is to cultural biases. Wikipedia handles the issue of constantly changing knowledge/culture by stating that its mission is to capture knowledge "as it currently" exists.

I'd like to see a version of the colornames scores where votes are weighed by recency. Older votes can still count, but in order to capture constantly changing/adapting culture and emerging consensuses we can maybe weigh more recent votes more heavily

Another thing I'd love to see is to just have accounts answer the question: "Which language have you spoken the most of in the past (7) years of your life?" I think this one simple data point can solve a LOOOT of the issues and captures both culture and heritage without having to differentiate between place of birth, changing life circumstances and upbringings, etc. This would also mean that people who speak Tagalog don't have to see their well-agreed-upon name for a color being overwritten by the norms of demographic majority of the userbase which skews English-speakers

---

Clearly I have a lot of thoughts haha. I still love that color-names exists. One thing I'd like to build out some day is something to aggregate all the different color naming schemes out there and have colornames.org simply be a source amongst many others. Similar projects already exist[2] but none that are explicit about being attempt to aggregate sources and not BE the ultimate word on what color is named what

.. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_colors

.. [1] https://github.com/davo/Color-Standards-and-Color-Nomenclatu...

.. [2] https://github.com/meodai/color-names

Welp, this ate my time. Fun. Cool.

Can confirm.

Yep. Error inside: function renderWheel().

Interestingly, errors in Chrome in the same function — apparently rendering continues however.

Guessing the problem is that the line: points += `${s.x} ${s.y}, `;

is adding an extra `, ` to the end of the string causing the assignment/parse that follows to fail.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I try to include rebeccapurple whenever I can in the web sites I build.

Some may consider it an Easter Egg. I consider it being a human, and a throwback to when computing was more of a community, and less of a competition.

I didn’t know about this 8 years ago. I’m glad I found out about it today - as the father of a young child - because this post was incredibly moving to me.

Thanks for sharing.

Same for me, and the "springgreen"/"mediumspringgreen" are practically the same color on my screen. I'm wondering what was the reason the original spec included those colors. Were CRT monitors of old that much better?

On my Mac, and on windows on my laptop, every colour is distinct. On Ubuntu on my laptop (with good monitor) many of the colours (the greens around the edge for example) look the same.

iOS and MacOS. It’s ok in chrome.

Seconded. Safari Version 16.0

Fine in Chrome. Thanks for this colour wheel, very handy reference.

Interesting, can you be more specific? Developed in Firefox, reports that Chrome is OK. I don't have a Mac to test with.

    t = document.createElement("template")
    t.innerHTML = `<style id="outside"></style><svg><style id="inside"></style></svg>`
    t.content.querySelector("#outside").sheet // null
    t.content.querySelector("#inside").sheet // undefined

Yep, Safari latest

https://imgur.com/a/Tsx9pEZ

A derived graphic: http://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/

Here's a derived word cloud.[1] Though it appears it's no longer interactive.

[1] https://www.luminoso.com/post/the-color-cloud

If I had to guess, it would be because they're the names you can use in place of RGB values in style/CSS

They are colours that have names in CSS. You can access 16M colours with #RRGGBB syntax but these colours are aliases to specific values and can be specified by name.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color

I take that to mean they're not discouraged. After all, the <marquee> element still appears to work in 2022. I imagine if named colors are ever removed as a feature from browsers, it won't be until a year like 2057.

We should instead encourage named colors AND recognize `chucknorris` as an actual HTML color value.