[whatwg] Colour correction (was: Canvas ImageData comments)

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 19, 2008, at 00:33, Arne Johannessen wrote:
[...]
> I'm not sure where all of this leads us. I mean, we can't expect  
> that the authors tag all their colours, but neither can we expect  
> all users to calibrate their screens.

Most of the time, the solutions to the color space problem are worse  
that the problem itself. The easiest fix for this whole mess would be  
making Mac OS X default to 2.2 gamma (i.e. be compatible with the  
overall legacy instead of the Mac legacy) and then continue to treat  
Web color values as being in the system color space.

[...]
> Perhaps I have time next week to check out what current browsers  
> actually do today. From past experience I expect that it's not  
> consistent in every situation; I recall some serious trouble working  
> with Safari in particular.


At least in order to avoid Breaking the Web, browsers need to treat  
all untagged colors in a mutually consistent way within a browser  
window regardless of the source of the color: image files, CSS,  
plugins, video, legacy HTML attributes, etc. The usual way to do this  
is to treat all untagged color values as being in the system color  
space.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/