Sunday, April 07, 2002
I managed to spend a good chunk of the afternoon writing the revised color section for the new book. Spent most of my time in research, trying to get a handle on the new color stuff covered in the forthcoming CSS3 specification, particularly the rendering-intent property. After reading the material thy referenced, I came away with the strong impression that the person doing the write-up of that part of the specification had no idea about how to write it -- or more likely, left the details for later -- since the reference material on it is useful only to a programmer. Then I found an excellent article on the subject by Bruce Fraser, which explains things from the perspective of a graphic artist. I ought to send him a note thanking him for his excellent article on the subject.
I am impressed with the way CSS3 is dealing with issues like opacity and making color values more intuitive. The RGBA method of defining opacity along with color makes a lot of sense. Their idea of incorporating HSL color values is also a good move -- it makes a lot more sense to specify different shades of say, red, by first selecting the hue, then selecting its saturation (read: shading) and then its brightness than trying to fiddle with various colors of red green and blue in order to get what you are looking for. This will all get extensive coverage in the new chapter I’m writing specifically on color.
I also spent some time laboriously converting all of the standard color name and equivalent RGB color values into HSL for a future reference chart. In the process, I was surprised to find that there are no color names for the majority of the colors on the "color safe" palette: I couldn't find a valid name for such commonly used hex values like #ffcc33 or #cccccc or even something as straightforward as #ffff00 for example. This is due primarily to the fact that the standard color names in use go back to those used in Unix, prior to the advent of the Web and the "safe color" palette. This might be worth sending a note off to the rep at the W3C about, just for the heck of it...
Related to this, I got an interesting note from my publisher Monday afternoon, introducing me to a new rep who'll be in charge of making the process of turning my text into a book a more efficient one. Halleluiah to that I say -- it's amazing how many hoops writers have to go through once their book is written: formatting issues, technical reviews, revamps and support issues. If this new person can help manage this process for me, more power to her. We've tentatively scheduled a teleconference for latter in the week in order to 'meet'. Based on my revised time-scale, Prentice Hall has a Fall launch for the book in mind, and they apparently intend to make it a premier title -- they've obviously done well by the first edition.
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