Talk:X11 color names

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is supported by the Color WikiProject, a project that provides a central approach to Color-related subjects on Wikipedia. Help us improve articles to good and 1.0 standards; visit the wikiproject page for more details.
Start This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] Duplicated colors

Some of these are the same color but the names are not. Whose problem is this?? 66.245.78.149 20:23, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've just checked the rgb.txt file on my PC (running XOrg 6.7.0) and it's that way in the original file. (The original file is in numerical order of colour triplets, so it's really obvious.) I'll add a note to the article - David Gerard 12:21, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Visibility?

Some of the colour names are also links to wiki nodes. Names for some of the darker colours are difficult to read, because wiki links are coloured blue. Blue on darkness == bad visibility.

Any idea what could be done to remedy this? What if we duplicate the name, first as plain text and second as a wiki link?

Tricky one ... they may be blue but aren't necessarily - David Gerard 16:41, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
To me, the obvious solution is to separate the text from the displayed colors, like this:
Name = Color Hex = Color RGB = Color
AliceBlue #F0F8FF 240, 248, 255
AntiqueWhite #FAEBD7 250, 235, 215
Aqua #00FFFF 0, 255, 255
Aquamarine #7FFFD4 127, 255, 212
...   ...   ...  
That way it doesn't matter which colors get linked. - dcljr 06:55, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo? and Other Added Colors

The copies of rgb.txt I have access to (XFree86 4.3.0, Xorg 6.8.1, the X server shipped with Solaris) don't contain an entry for indigo. What is the source of the indigo entry?

Same for copies of rgb.txt I have access to: Xorg 6.8.2, XFree86 4.2.1, XFree86 4.1.0, and also Emacs 21.4 and 21.2 (for Cygwin). http://vancouver-webpages.com/DIY/color.html mentions that Netscape and WebTV, but not rgb.txt, have indigo; but that's all the info I could find online about it (other than pages including it in a list of X11 color names). --Mairi 06:29, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Comparing this list to my actual rgb.txt ($Xorg: rgb.txt,v 1.3 2000/08/17 19:54:00 cpqbld Exp $), these eight colors are in the wikipedia article but not in the file: aqua, crimson, fuchsia, indigo, lime, olive, silver, and teal. Furthermore, some colors listed in rgb.txt aren't listed in the article, not including the numbered colors (ie "gray99"). Also, the list doesn't stay consistent with its naming of the grays, while rgb.txt lists both the American English spelling (gray) and the British English spelling (grey) every time that name is used. Clearly, the list presented in the article isn't from an actual copy of rgb.txt. --Jaybeeunix 02:17, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

This authorative page [1] lists 140, the WP article has seven more, all of which are gray/grey variants. I am therefore removing the disputed tag, which in any case should have been inserted in the article only after failure to reach a concensus here. Viajero | Talk 17:49, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
[2] is not an authoritative page for this article. As the article states, that is “a list of the X11 colors [X11COLORS] supported by popular browsers” (my emphasis added). Thus, that page only purports to be a subset of the X11 colors. The subset nature is more obvious if one follows the link to which the w3c page refers to as the authority of that list. --Jaybeeunix 17:07, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gamma Correction

Are these gamma corrected? Do they assume they will be displayed on a standard 2.5 gamma CRT or LCD? Otherwise, the values need to go through gamma correction to see the real result (see http://xona.com/colorlist for an example of how FAR off the mark colors can be without proper gamma correction). Also, you can't assume the browser programmers to have thought of this. The standard 6x6x6 = 216 colors 'web safe colors' are an example of where they just don't 'get' gamma correction: Web_colors.137.186.22.189 20:44, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Since this article is about X11 I think it should be noted that the individual X servers (basically the display) have an option to specify one’s gamma correction for his/her hardware. For example, see the -gamma, -rgamma, -ggamma, and -bgamma options in XFree86-like servers. --Jaybeeunix 18:44, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
If the orginal list was given in sRGB and the user has calibrated his monitor properly, then using the original RGB values should yield the result we want. Shinobu 03:12, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Table simplification

I've made the following changes to the table:

  1. Removed background color from all text cells so everyone can read the text, regardless of gamma/monitor settings, etc.; only Sample column now shows the colors.
  2. Used hex to specify color in "style" attribute (figured this would be the most widely supported, although any browser that knows "style" should be able to handle all three ways of specifying color — another reason I removed color from the other 2 columns). If you know that some browsers/OSs will show different colors depending on how they are specified (name/hex/rgb), please discuss here.
  3. Removed a lot of the formatting (font size, text alignment); made color-name cells regular cells rather than header cells; changed "monospace" style to <tt> tags (better browser support, I assume).
  4. Linked "Hex" and "RGB" in header (oh, and removed "#" from hex values in that column).

I hope there aren't any major objections; this article has just bugged me for a long time, so I decided to finally do something about it. - dcljr (talk) 00:19, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I changed the table format to match List of colors. I think the table looks much nicer with RGB values in seperate columns. However, I also reintroduced bold names, #-prefixes, and some right-aligned text. I did this mostly for consistency, rather than personal preference. If you strongly disagree with these changes, the #-prefixes and bold names are easily removed with find-and-replace. But please consider keeping the RGB values right-aligned. They're prettier that way. —Ryanrs 13:03, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Not sure why that would be, but whatever. That's fine. Still looks a lot better than before my last edit. - dcljr (talk) 06:39, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Wonderful work all the way around, but the list was more useful to me when the groupings were by color; e.g., I want to look through the reds, or the greens, or whatever. The Turkish translation still has this arrangement, and I hope it gets kept. For the English language, I think it's fine to leave what's here as-is, and add another table that's grouped by appearance. Marc W. Abel 22:25, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I completely agree - wonderful work on the simplified table format - thanks dclrj! Marc - maybe the table grouping by color could be made into it's own page. I would also find that useful. Then you could link that article to this page. --Unixguy 11:37, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Marc - for the table grouped by color, see the Web Colors article. --Unixguy