4 ms·
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
by 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 agoThanks, 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.