I read today's thread about <smell> and I disagree - we have a higher priority to deal with.
We really need to replace RGB with RGBU: red, green, blue, ultraviolet. After all, some people have cones in their eyes to detect ultraviolet light. I believe the technical term is "tetrachromacy", or something like that. It's the reverse of color-blindness in a sense: we're not serving the full spectrum that some people can see! Pros: * This helps women who actually can distinguish the ultraviolet colors. * Instead of 24 bits for color (a non-standard word size in computer science), we could use 32 bits (which is much more common in computer programming). * The fourth argument in the color: and background-color rules, being ultraviolet and thus beyond the normal range of vision, becomes optional. Cons: * Computer monitors aren't built to show ultraviolet colors. (Here, though, we'd get ahead of the hardware, and let vendors catch up.) * Ultraviolet rays from the Sun have been shown to cause skin cancers... so medical studies would have to be done to determine a safe maximum to emit from the monitor. The 255 level of ultraviolet should not come close to that. Why not infrared, to show warmth? Because the RGB pattern goes from lower frequencies to higher ones; to support infrared it would change to IRGB, breaking backwards compatibility with RGB pretty badly. Sorry, romantics: your monitors must remain, at least on the surface, very cold. Blame us in the standards community for that. Alex Vincent Hayward, CA -- "The first step in confirming there is a bug in someone else's work is confirming there are no bugs in your own." -- Alexander J. Vincent, June 30, 2001
