Subject: Re: syntax for the color property
From: Frodo Looijaard (frodol@dds.nl)
Date: Wed Jan 10 2001 - 16:19:57 CST
Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>
> At 10:08 PM +0100 1/10/01, Frodo Looijaard wrote:
> >Ehm, stupid question maybe, but why is the current way of specifying
> >colors (through hex RGB) not good enough in all cases?
>
> Because you might want to specify it in some other color
> space such as grayscale, CMYK, etc.
Hmm. I still do not see any real advantage in this, because AFAIK (though
I am no expert in color conversions), each of them is easily converted
to each other. You need to do this conversion anyway, because internally
in AbiWord you do not want many different ways to represent the same
color (just think about the complications in the code everywhere...).
> >Why would you ever want `blue' in the fileformat, instead of `00ff00'?
>
> Because you were coding the format by hand, or by some tool
> OTHER than AbiWord.
If you are coding by hand, there are a lot of other things that are
much harder; and if you are using some other tool, this is not an
issue at all: you have to translate many things anyway, and adding
a color conversion table is easy to do (I do know a bit about such
tools, having written several Psion importers and exporters).
> Why does CSS and XSL do it?
Because they are primarily meant to be written and used directly by
humans, instead of by computer programs.
So I am still not convinced, but I am hardly the person for you to
convince anyway :-)
Good luck,
Frodo
-- Frodo Looijaard <frodol@dds.nl> PGP key and more: http://huizen.dds.nl/~frodol Defenestration n. (formal or joc.): The act of removing Windows from your computer in disgust, usually followed by the installation of Linux or some other Unix-like operating system.
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