Tom Lianza:
Mark, that is not the reason the problem is not addressed. It was NEVER part of the Web specification, that is the reason it is not addressed. My own feeling is that color management “on the web” will not be handled by a browser, but by a web application. There are solutions to this, but they won’t be free.
Jan-Peter Homann:
So far as I know, several W3C specifications reference, that untagged data (images and graphic content) should be handled as sRGB in the document to monitor chain. [...]
In think, it is the most important task of the ICC today to develop recommendations how the different levels of colormanagement should interact: - application level - OS level - device level
I will start also a task about this, at the internal ICC Graphic Arts Special interest Group and give some feedback to the Colorsync Mailinglist if something relevant happens there...
Tom Lianza's statement is, as Jan-Peter says, incorrect. Both the CSS and SVG specifications address this question. In the "color" section of SVG, http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/color.html
All SVG colors are specified in the sRGB color space [SRGB]. At a minimum, SVG user agents shall conform to the color behavior requirements specified in the color units section and the minimal gamma correction rules defined in the CSS2 specification.
In CSS, http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/syndata.html#color-units
All RGB colors are specified in the sRGB color space (see [SRGB]). User agents may vary in the fidelity with which they represent these colors, but using sRGB provides an unambiguous and objectively measurable definition of what the color should be, which can be related to international standards (see [COLORIMETRY]).
Unfortunately, the HTML 5 canvas specification does not include any * * * I and others have been pressuring browser vendors to do proper color management of CSS colors for years now, without tremendous progress. Some useful links include: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page3 http://www.webkit.org/blog/73/color-spaces/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16769 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9567 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2602 My (possibly incorrect) recollection of the current state of browsers is: * Firefox has color management for CSS colors and untagged images (i.e. can assume they are sRGB), but it is turned off by default, leaving colors in the display's color space. I don’t know whether images tagged with a color profile are treated properly when that setting is off. They might be. * Safari has color management for images with embedded profiles, but not for untagged images or CSS/SVG/etc. colors. The excuse given in 2006 (!) was that because Adobe Flash colors were not color managed, other colors could not be either without causing a mismatch which would break the color coordination of web pages. * Chrome (inexcusably; one of the dozens of deal-breaker compatibility problems with that browser) does not support any kind of color management. * Opera also (and also inexcusably) does no color management. I don’t know what the story is for Internet Explorer, for Adobe Flash, or for mobile devices like Android phones or iPads, but I wouldn’t have high expectations for any of them. Essentially every browser currently violates the W3C specifications w/r/t color management, which is extremely frustrating for anyone who cares about both color and the web. Cheers, Jacob Rus