One notable difference between X11 and W3C is the case of "Gray" and its variants. In HTML, "Gray" is specifically reserved for the 128 triplet (50% gray). However, in X11, "gray" was assigned to the 190 triplet (74.5%), which is close to W3C "Silver" at 192 (75.3%), and had "Light Gray" at 211 (83%) and "Dark Gray" at 169 (66%) counterparts. As a result, the combined CSS 3.0 color list that prevails on the web today produces "Dark Gray" as a significantly lighter tone than plain "Gray", because "Dark Gray" was descended from X11 – for it did not exist in HTML nor CSS level 1 – while "Gray" was descended from HTML. Even in the current draft for CSS 4.0, dark gray continues to be a lighter shade than gray. Some browsers such as Netscape Navigator insisted on an "a" in any "Gray" except for "Light Grey".

[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

"Gray" with an A looks so wrong to my eyes. I don't think I ever see it used normally.

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

"Grey if it's in England, gray if it's in America."

Same as tire vs tyre, center vs centre and so on.

[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

I am an American living in America, still looks weird.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 points 17 hours ago

I knew it'd be something like that. Don't try to fix it, would be my advice. BTW my rgb.txt seems to have 2 entries for every tone of grey resp. gray.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Once at a job when I was supposed to make a website work (and I'll stress, I am not a graphic designer and wasn't hired as one!) I made the layout as nice as I could, but I insisted on only using named CSS colors because I just do. not. care. about color theory. By which I mean, I don't want to waste time and do a crappy job at it when someone else could do it much better and properly and faster. So the named colors are meant as an obvious placeholder for a more creative person to replace with something real later.

When my boss gave me feedback he just said that it's ugly. I started saying "yeah, the colors are placeholders, we can change that easily. I'll fiddle it with it I'll stick with named colors" (above explanation was to follow).

Before I even got to the named colors bit, he interrupted me and said "don't use named colors ever".

I guess maybe I was hired as a graphic designer? News to me!

(I'm making him sound awful but he was actually a really good boss. This interaction is not representative of our usual dynamics. I'm not employed by him anymore but we are on good terms.)

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 points 17 hours ago

Before I even got to the named colors bit, he interrupted me and said “don’t use named colors ever”.

He recognized the tones. Used to be known as "web friendly" a long time ago.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 23 hours ago

I literally only use them when testing.