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What is the advantage of restricting the palette to a color depth of 12 bits, when every display device the colors are likely to be shown on supports much highe

by p-e-w 4y ago

What is the advantage of restricting the palette to a color depth of 12 bits, when every display device the colors are likely to be shown on supports much higher color depth, and printing yields much wider color ranges as well? The only hint given in the article is > so each colour requires only four characters when specified as a hexadecimal colour code in a CSS or SVG file but surely this can't be the answer? Such a minor technical detail doesn't seem worth deviating even slightly from the "ideal" HCL values.

epidemian 4y ago
IDK it's cool to be able to write these nice colors with 3 hex characters :)
tasuki 4y ago
I think I understand why. I think the primary reason is that it's minimalist and very much empathise with such endeavours. There are several advantages to such minimalism: easier to read and write in code, fewer bytes to store and transfer, and perhaps also satisfying one's ocd. Let me flip this on you: why use 6 characters to specify colours when 3 will do fine? What exactly would your "ideal" HCL values be?
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > What exactly would your "ideal" HCL values be? The post specifically mentions that "slight changes" to the constructed HCL values "must be made" in order to conform to the 12-bit color depth. So the author first derived certain values from theoretical/aesthetic considerations, then modified them for the sole purpose of fitting into 12 bits. This doesn't make sense to me except in very, very niche cases where saving 3 bytes (or even less, considering compression) actually matters more than visual quality.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    Thanks, I missed that part. But also it appears you missed that these changes aren't noticeable: > Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to hue, chroma, and luminance must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. Again, I don't think it's about saving the disk/network the 3 characters. It's about minimalism and perhaps about developer experience: these colours are easier to read, write, and remember. Is that worth nothing? Perhaps you use a CSS preprocessor and can define variables for your colours and don't need to write them down repeatedly. But perhaps other people don't. Or perhaps they're porting a colour scheme to many different applications. In these cases, three letter colour codes are superior to six letter ones.

by p-e-w 4y ago

epidemian 4y ago

IDK it's cool to be able to write these nice colors with 3 hex characters :)

tasuki 4y ago

I think I understand why. I think the primary reason is that it's minimalist and very much empathise with such endeavours. There are several advantages to such minimalism: easier to read and write in code, fewer bytes to store and transfer, and perhaps also satisfying one's ocd. Let me flip this on you: why use 6 characters to specify colours when 3 will do fine? What exactly would your "ideal" HCL values be?

p-e-w 4y ago
> What exactly would your "ideal" HCL values be? The post specifically mentions that "slight changes" to the constructed HCL values "must be made" in order to conform to the 12-bit color depth. So the author first derived certain values from theoretical/aesthetic considerations, then modified them for the sole purpose of fitting into 12 bits. This doesn't make sense to me except in very, very niche cases where saving 3 bytes (or even less, considering compression) actually matters more than visual quality.
- tasuki 4y ago
  Thanks, I missed that part. But also it appears you missed that these changes aren't noticeable: > Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to hue, chroma, and luminance must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. Again, I don't think it's about saving the disk/network the 3 characters. It's about minimalism and perhaps about developer experience: these colours are easier to read, write, and remember. Is that worth nothing? Perhaps you use a CSS preprocessor and can define variables for your colours and don't need to write them down repeatedly. But perhaps other people don't. Or perhaps they're porting a colour scheme to many different applications. In these cases, three letter colour codes are superior to six letter ones.