3 ms·

HWB makes a lot more sense to the average human beings than HSL/LAB. You pick a fully saturated color, and then you darken or lighten it to get the precise shad

HWB makes a lot more sense to the average human beings than HSL/LAB. You pick a fully saturated color, and then you darken or lighten it to get the precise shade of that color that you want. It’s a huge win for UI over, say, RGB (100% red and 50% green makes no sense to anyone but designers and lighting technicians). Think of it as a magical shortcut for picking HSL, but instead of picking “orange, mostly saturated, then desaturated” you’re combining those last two into a single triangle picker whose three corners are the Hue, White, and Black.

jacobolus 7y ago
Concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” are fine, but this “HWB” is just a trivial rearrangement of RGB, and as such has very little to do with human perception, and much more to do with the specific implementation details of the output medium. HWB (like RGB and HSL and HSV) does not make sense to “average human beings”. It only makes sense to people who have spent years training on the specifics of RGB displays (e.g. your proposed “lighting technicians”). For everyone else it is a confusing mess which produces bad results which differ significantly from their intentions. If you want a color model related to NCS, specify something which properly follows its principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System > magical shortcut This is neither magical nor a shortcut. It’s a superfluous hassle that anyone who wants to implement the spec needs to implement, debug, and maintain, and anyone reading the markup for arbitrary web pages needs to know about one more weird complication. If individual web designers want to use this idiosyncratic tool, they are welcome to put it in their page’s javascript, or add it to their CSS pre-processor. But it should not be foisted on the rest of us.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  The NCS image at the link you provide above literally shows the exact three-cornered orange-white-black triangle at position -Y10R that is shown in this image, which appears to use the exact hue sequence shown in your wiki link’s animation. I’m confused why you object to it being supported. Is your objection to their use of Hue spectrum positions 0,90,180,270 (R,G,C,M) - as already implemented in CSS today - as the four saturated qualia rather than NCS’s specified four qualia positions of 0,90,180,270 (R,Y,G,B)? HWB: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GTK_color_chooser.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GTK_color_chooser.pn... NCS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_the_NCS_Colour_System.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_the_NCS...
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    It is emphatically not “literally the exact [...] triangle”. The NCS is a similar concept, but executed based on a plausible theoretical model and (more or less) sound empirical study of human perceptual response to visual stimuli. “HWB”, like HSL, is just someone’s trivial half-assed transformation of the RGB cube, completely ignoring more than a century of color science research. It’s what you get when a person off the street were tasked with redefining the NCS, without understanding it. It reminds me of people’s bicycle sketches, http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html Personally I am not the biggest fan of the NCS system for designating colors; I find Munsell-like coordinate systems to work better for me, in practice. But at least it has some kind of theoretical and empirical basis.
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      This paper from a few years ago compares various mathematical definitions of "hue" that have been popular over the past few decades. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7833/f96c09a1201f0e7f54e0de662e4faef36276.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7833/f96c09a1201f0e7f54e0de... CSS, having already standardized on Munsell hue circles (page 5) in the past, appears content to continue forward with them as the hue circle of choice for HWB. While I respect that you would prefer to see them use the NSL hue circle (pages 10-11), it appears that they are unlikely to do so at this time. One bonus find here is the abstract for the cited Whitfield (1988) paper, where the paper's authors attempted to replicate the assertion that NSL is better than Munsell, and failed: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.5080130210 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.5080130210 The study reported here is a replication of experiments cited as support for this claim. Subjects were trained in the NCS using NCS training material and carried out colour‐identification tasks. For comparison, a further subject group was trained in the Munsell system and carried out identical tasks. The results indicated (a) a lower level of accuracy than previously reported for those subjects trained in the NCS and (b) little difference in performance between the NCS‐ and Munsell‐trained groups.
      - jacobolus 7y ago

jacobolus 7y ago

Concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” are fine, but this “HWB” is just a trivial rearrangement of RGB, and as such has very little to do with human perception, and much more to do with the specific implementation details of the output medium. HWB (like RGB and HSL and HSV) does not make sense to “average human beings”. It only makes sense to people who have spent years training on the specifics of RGB displays (e.g. your proposed “lighting technicians”). For everyone else it is a confusing mess which produces bad results which differ significantly from their intentions. If you want a color model related to NCS, specify something which properly follows its principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System > magical shortcut This is neither magical nor a shortcut. It’s a superfluous hassle that anyone who wants to implement the spec needs to implement, debug, and maintain, and anyone reading the markup for arbitrary web pages needs to know about one more weird complication. If individual web designers want to use this idiosyncratic tool, they are welcome to put it in their page’s javascript, or add it to their CSS pre-processor. But it should not be foisted on the rest of us.

floatingatoll 7y ago
The NCS image at the link you provide above literally shows the exact three-cornered orange-white-black triangle at position -Y10R that is shown in this image, which appears to use the exact hue sequence shown in your wiki link’s animation. I’m confused why you object to it being supported. Is your objection to their use of Hue spectrum positions 0,90,180,270 (R,G,C,M) - as already implemented in CSS today - as the four saturated qualia rather than NCS’s specified four qualia positions of 0,90,180,270 (R,Y,G,B)? HWB: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GTK_color_chooser.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GTK_color_chooser.pn... NCS: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_the_NCS_Colour_System.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_the_NCS...
- jacobolus 7y ago
  It is emphatically not “literally the exact [...] triangle”. The NCS is a similar concept, but executed based on a plausible theoretical model and (more or less) sound empirical study of human perceptual response to visual stimuli. “HWB”, like HSL, is just someone’s trivial half-assed transformation of the RGB cube, completely ignoring more than a century of color science research. It’s what you get when a person off the street were tasked with redefining the NCS, without understanding it. It reminds me of people’s bicycle sketches, http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html Personally I am not the biggest fan of the NCS system for designating colors; I find Munsell-like coordinate systems to work better for me, in practice. But at least it has some kind of theoretical and empirical basis.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    This paper from a few years ago compares various mathematical definitions of "hue" that have been popular over the past few decades. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7833/f96c09a1201f0e7f54e0de662e4faef36276.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7833/f96c09a1201f0e7f54e0de... CSS, having already standardized on Munsell hue circles (page 5) in the past, appears content to continue forward with them as the hue circle of choice for HWB. While I respect that you would prefer to see them use the NSL hue circle (pages 10-11), it appears that they are unlikely to do so at this time. One bonus find here is the abstract for the cited Whitfield (1988) paper, where the paper's authors attempted to replicate the assertion that NSL is better than Munsell, and failed: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.5080130210 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.5080130210 The study reported here is a replication of experiments cited as support for this claim. Subjects were trained in the NCS using NCS training material and carried out colour‐identification tasks. For comparison, a further subject group was trained in the Munsell system and carried out identical tasks. The results indicated (a) a lower level of accuracy than previously reported for those subjects trained in the NCS and (b) little difference in performance between the NCS‐ and Munsell‐trained groups.
    - jacobolus 7y ago