[whatwg] Web forms 2, input type suggestions
Martin Atkins
mart at degeneration.co.uk
Mon Jul 16 00:51:30 PDT 2007
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>
> Here's a few sites I found that ask the user to select colours.
>
> http://www.haymespaint.com.au/haymes/colourcentre/
> http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
> http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/
>
> I can't figure out how any of those would benefit from the new input
> type. Can you? Are there any other sites that would?
>
These are some rather contrived examples. The first is asking users to
select real-world (i.e. paint) colours, while this proposal was for
screen colours in RGB format. (At least, that was my understanding based
on the reference to six-digit hex encoding.)
The other two are specialized colour exploration tools aimed at designers.
The uses I had in mind (and, I suspect, the original poster too) were
systems where colour isn't *the main point* of the application, but
where it is still necessary for some reason.
My imagination here is largely limited to content management, blogging
or other similar applications:
* LiveJournal[1] allows users to customize their "journal" pages in a
number of ways, including changing the colour scheme. LiveJournal
currently implements its own colour picker which has support for
entering either RGB or HSL values or picking them from a rather-dubious
spectrum selector thingy. (Sadly, this is only accessible to logged-in
users.)
* Various in-browser WYSIWYG editors, such as FCK[1], allow the
end-user to choose colours for their text, background and table cells.
While I think most here would agree that WYSIWYG editors are not ideal,
they *are* out there and people used them. It'd be nice if they all
didn't need to implement their own colour picker with a different UI.
Both of these (which I guess you could argue are two examples of the
same use-case) would benefit from reduced development time due to not
needing to develop or source a DHTML colour picker, improved
accessibility due to reduced dependency on JavaScript, and a more
intuitive UI because the picker would be consistent across applications
and (hopefully) consistent with pickers in desktop apps on the same
platform.
[1] http://www.livejournal.com/
[2] http://www.fckeditor.net/
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