The assumption is that using another color space (like proposed CIE) would unlock mathematical manipulation of color palettes in design. I don't think this is true.<p>Our eyes are very sensitive to color shades and we'll easily notice if something is off. Colors are carefully picked by designers to fit together in quite subjective and non-mathematical manner. From observing some well constructed palettes, I derived the basic process used to create them. Pick the approximate colors you want, arrange them so they are all visible, and then tweak color shades so that all of them could exist under same lightning conditions in physical world. If some color seems jarring or wrong, that's because it could only exist under different lightning from rest of palette.<p>The text seems to neglect the vast amount of information lost when we use just a single point in color space to represent the whole light spectrum. For example, magenta signifies presence of both bluish and reddish wavelengths. If your math is not based on spectrum components, how do you hope to arrive to correct color when mixing two spectrums? Linear interpolation between two points in color space?<p>I think HSL is huge improvement over RGB model for designers, but other color spaces aren't really worth the effort. If you need light and dark theme for your UI, both will need to be hand crafted. Shifting hues by 5% or calculating complementary color won't be good enough.
I appreciate trying to extend CSS to provide functions that move through a/the gammut more intuitively, but I also fear feature-creep. CSS was originally a method for setting parameters, now it is becoming a procedural (or sort-of functional) language.<p>When it was just a parameter conifg file, there was only the need to check lexical and grammatical consistency. Now we've got to have functional regressions and computations standards... and everything that comes with a compiler verification suite. Ugh.<p>On the one hand, I think it absolutely makes sense to keep color management in the CSS, but I also see a big ol' slippery slope.
> Your monitor does, and if you have a TV capable of HDR (hi dynamic range) that's got a wider gammut, for example...<p>Not true, hdr just means a better contrast ratio.
In general, Yes this is a big issue when dealing with colors. One example where you run into this; is when you'r reducing color space from say 256 to say 12 color space (most common colors). Using LAB really helps but still not perfect.
The post lost some credibility right away when they spelled "gamut" with two m's. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut</a><p>The big rainbow has some problems too. It should be obvious by looking at the transition line from color to black-and-white that brightnesses are inaccurate. There's another problem that I don't ever see discussed - the yellow, cyan, and magenta colors really are brighter than the rest of the colors because of the way our monitors work, they have twice as many photons because they emit two different primary colors.