2 posts on CSS Color

I’ve been interested in digital color for a long time, and this year I decided to risk giving a technical talk about color some of the conferences I’m speaking at. “Why is that risky?” you might ask. Well, it might end up being really interesting, or it may end up alienating both designers because it’s too technical and developers because it’s about a “designery” topic.

In preparation for this talk, I decided to make a simple game to see how well I and other web developers understand color, and especially CSS notations of color. Meet Whathecolor!

The idea is simple: You are presented with a color and you try to type in a CSS color that matches it. It could be anything, from hsl() or rgb() to even named colors (although that would be stupid). It would be interesting to see what averages people get by trying hsl() vs rgb() and whether the former is as easier for web developers as we think. Feel free to post your results here or on twitter! Perhaps in the future, something like this could be used by the CSS WG to test the usability of color notations we’re thinking of adding to CSS instead of speculating about it.

Disclaimer: This is a quick hack. Please don’t complain that it doesn’t look great on your phone and stuff like that.

Also, yes, if you want to cheat, it’s super easy, but I have no idea why somebody would cheat on something like this.

Play

Color proximity

A challenging part in developing this was calculating the proximity of two colors to show the user how close they are getting. My first thought was to use the Euclidean distance of the two colors in the RGB cube and divide it by the maximum distance the color could have from any other RGB color. However, this proved out to be inaccurate in many cases, probably due to the lack of perceptual uniformity in RGB. As an example, try #f0f and #ff80ff. Although they are quite similar visually, the reported proximity was around 66% (1 - 128/382).

So I researched  existing algorithms to get the proximity of two colors. Like most things color-related, it looks like Color Difference is not quite as simple as I thought, and is considered a topic of interest in Color Science. However, converting to L*a*b* and using the CIE94 and CIEDE2000 formulas seemed a bit of an overkill for this and I wasn’t terribly impressed with the CIE76 formula after trying the results out online for some sample pairs (e.g. it gives ~60% for the aforementioned pair, which is even lower than what I got with my naïve RGB method!).

So I experimented a bit and ended up using an average of my original idea and a sum of the HSL differences (divided by the max differences), which seems to work relatively ok.  There are still cases where it’s off, but ho hum. After all, the proximity is mainly useful when you get close enough to the color (>90%), as until then you tend to play it by eye. Any improvements on the algorithm used are welcome. Or if enough people think it’s not working very well, I’ll bite the bullet and end up using DeltaE.

Other notes

• You do not need a proximity of 100% to win, since rounding errors might prevent you from matching the exact color if you’re using HSL. Also, because matching the exact same color isn’t really important, as long as you get close enough that any difference is imperceptible.
• I wrote a Color “class” for this, which you can find in color.js. Like most of my open source stuff, it’s MIT licensed. Maybe it could be useful in some other color-related project, who knows.
• My original idea was to have “levels”, where the color would get increasingly more difficult to get. For example, in the first level, you’d only have to guess simple colors whose RGB coordinates were either 0, 128 or 255. So, my Color.random() method accepts an entropy parameter, for that level. However, when I tested the game with truly random colors (any integer from 0 to 255), it turned out it wasn’t really that hard (it took me about a minute to guess each color), so I ditched the idea of levels early on. The code is still there though.
• An idea about making it harder in the future would be to introduce semi-transparent (RGBA/HSLA) colors. That would be fun :evil_grin:

PS: The times in this screenshot aren’t real, I wanted to take one quickly, so I used the dev tools.

Whenever I wanted to convert a CSS named color to RGB, I used to open the CSS3 colors spec in a new tab, search in the page and copied the values. Every time it felt even more tedious. I didn’t want to search in long tables, I wanted to type the color somewhere and get the values back, in an easy to copy format. So, after yet another color lookup earlier today, I decided to scratch my own itch and do it myself.

Of course, I didn’t plan to include a whole database of CSS colors in the website. My idea was much simpler: Use the named color to draw a rectangle in a <canvas> and then read the R,G,B values through ctx.getImageData().

I got the core functionality done in under 10 minutes, so I started adding stuff. I added a hex and HSL representation, I used canvas.toDataURL() to get a data URI of the rectangle and use it as a dynamic favicon*, I made the colors sharable and bookmarkable by using an old-fashioned hash. Also, I realized it actually supports any CSS supported color represenation by design, not just named colors.

Regarding the color conversions themselves, I took extra care to avoid redundancy. So values < 1 don’t have leading zeroes (.5 instead of 0.5) and when the hex color is in the format #xxyyzz it gets converted to #xyz. When it’s an RGBA color, it still converts it to hex, since those values will be supported in CSS4.

Since it’s for developers, I didn’t bother at all with fallbacks.

Cool stuff used:

• HTML5: canvas, autofocus, output, oninput event, hashchange event
• CSS3: gradients, media queries, box-sizing, background-clip, border-radius, shadows, RGBA
• ES5: Array#map()
• Selectors API

The reason the input’s border appears weird on Webkit is this long standing Webkit bug. Also, for some reason my nice dynamic favicons don’t display on Firefox, although they display fine in Webkit and Opera.

Enjoy: CSS.coloratum

Happy color sharing! Let me know of any problems or suggestions you may have.

PS: In case you’re wondering about the domain, I’ve had it for ages for another project and I thought it was quite fitting.

*Thanks to @milo for giving me the idea of using a dynamic favicon