[whatwg] Web forms 2, input type suggestions

[Martin Atkins]

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/