Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 December 7

= December 7 =

Green or lime??
Why do "web colors" use "green" for a green-black color and "lime" for pure green?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:47, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * This goes back to 1990 and Windows 3.0. The palette, with those color names, can be seen at List of software palettes. They are in pairs of light and dark. I speculate that single-word names were desirable for archaic computing purposes, and how would you name dark green with a single word? (They are also short, all being less than eight letters long.) Card Zero  (talk) 18:28, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Pine. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:38, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * SMW, Pine (color) is a ghost link. Georgia guy (talk) 18:50, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair enough :) you are more inspired than 1990 Bill Gates. W3.org provide a note about how terrible the color names are. Card Zero  (talk) 18:52, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * That link also (correctly) states the source of many of the colors, X11. They were not standardized or even sensible. I once worked on project with a Unix developer named John Thomas. He said that he spent hours guessing at the RGB colors of every crayon in a box of crayons. There was a lot of them, but I don't know the exact count. He named the colors the same as Crayola did. That means that you had issues with colors defined before he started, causing issues like Gray being darker than DarkGray. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 21:32, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
 * X11 color names confirms this (and mentions John), but says that the problems with the grays came later, due to the W3C combining the X11 colors with its own 16 "basic HTML colors", from the Windows VGA palette (as web colors says). It also mentions the problem with "Lime", one of the 16 taken from Windows, which was (sensibly enough) called "Green" in X11. I have lately been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress, which uses its own set of 114 terrible color names, leading to descriptions of dwarfs such as "Her skin is pumpkin. Her hair is chocolate. Her eyes are brass." Card Zero  (talk) 00:19, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
 * As is noted above, these systems have a history that gets carried forward, and in the early days many of these decisions were often made by one lone developer based on their whims that day. John Thomas pulling crayons out of a box and assigning names to colors that way is the typical way these things start out, and the legacy gets carried forward through history.  No one uproots an existing system because it is illogical, because there's never a moment when it is possible to make such a clean break from an existing system.  We just have to add to and adapt the existing system as the system evolves.  There's no grand plan, and there's no central authority, just lots of individual people making mostly arbitrary decisions, and the unorganized accumulation of those decisions over time.  -- Jayron 32 00:51, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Crayons as a metaphor for life — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 01:22, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Specifications Last Forever - I don't know what this forum is (something about model engines) but this text is a very old popular Usenet post: I remember being handed it (printed out!) in a pub in the early 90s. The facts in it are dubious, but it's nice to see that the post lasts forever, too. Card Zero  (talk) 01:58, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * It's about 50% accurate. The ruts business is a bit dubious but the rest is right.  The Romans used stepping stones across streets (a sort of zebra crossing) and carts had to fit both these and the gaps left in the threshold of city gates. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:18, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I really do not care how "true" it is. It is a lovely story and so "reasonable". The point is that specifications are based on a history and sometimes that history has no rigorous logic, but it is what it is — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 23:46, 10 December 2021 (UTC)