Color management in web browsers, was: Printing with No Color Management (again)
Color management in web browsers, was: Printing with No Color Management (again)
- Subject: Color management in web browsers, was: Printing with No Color Management (again)
- From: Chris Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:22:03 -0600
On Apr 29, 2011, at 4:59 AM, Ernst Dinkla wrote:
> No mention has been made in this thread of the Apple default in Safari to assign the monitor profile and not to assign sRGB if an untagged image is loaded. Though not on topic in this thread I think that it sketches Apple's attitude in a nutshell.
>
> "We have a better solution even if it doesn't fit reality"
This is not the same thing. There are problems with doing this that require other parties to get on board, and that hasn't happened for various reasons. This is something I really want to work on, but I can't do it by myself. It would require some involvement of the W3C, Google, Apple, Microsoft, other web browser developers, Adobe, and perhaps a handful of key online companies to figure this out.
It is very possible sRGB is not a great choice to assume for the average display anymore. I haven't seen any recent studies on this. But I regularly see the blue primary of LCD displays lack substantial correlation to the sRGB blue primary.
If Apple assumes untagged RGB is sRGB and applies automatic conversions to the display, there is an immediate disconnect with untagged CSS, HTML and Flash elements. This just doesn't work for web designers at all - it fails to meet user and developer expectations. Flash does have optional support to assume content is sRGB using ActionScript. There was a proposal for tagging content in CSS3, but as far as I know that was dropped because no web browser company decided to implement what was proposed, or clean up what was proposed to match reality or best practices.
Now we could fix two of these problems by saying all untagged content: CSS, HTML, GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc. are all assumed to be sRGB and thus subject to conversion. But that would still leave Flash and any other browser plugin out (as they have to independently implement color management for their content, over which that plugin has exclusive domain) of the picture. I have some ideas how that can be dealt with, but it requires agreement from numerous parties to make it workable.
There's also a question of the performance hit for color managing everything on the display, and doing the necessary platform specific optimization to make that happen. Because of hardware capability this may become less of a concern on the desktop, but I think mobile needs consideration of a compatible solution that doesn't require it to be a outlier in terms of how content is prepared.
And we also have Windows which still does not build display profiles from EDID info, so they assume their displays are already sRGB, and all source content is sRGB, thus no conversion by default for 90% of the user base. So for the vast majority of the market, no change occurs at all for all of this effort. Really we need to pounce on the display vendors to ensure good correlation between reality and EDID color behavior for displays. And we really need Microsoft to start building display profiles on the fly from EDID. Even Linux is getting on the ball in this area.
With an ecosystem like the internet, you can't just go for solutions that work on one platform or it makes life difficult on other platforms and therefore the single platform solution gets immediately canned. So the only way I see us effectively dealing with color on the web is in a platform agnostic manner.
Chris Murphy _______________________________________________
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