racket/draw

Why are "cornflowerblue" and "cornflower blue" different colors?

Opened this issue · 5 comments

There are several places in racket/draw/private/color.rkt where two names differ by a space, but are defined as the same color. However, "cornflowerblue" and "cornflower blue" seem to break this pattern. Is there a reason why they are different?

Definition of "cornflowerblue":
https://github.com/racket/draw/blob/master/draw-lib/racket/draw/private/color.rkt#L143

 ("cornflowerblue" . #(100 149 237))

#6495ed

Definition of "cornflower blue":
https://github.com/racket/draw/blob/master/draw-lib/racket/draw/private/color.rkt#L249

 ("cornflower blue" . #(68 64 108))

#44406c

It looks like "cornflowerblue" without the space has the same RGB values as the X11 cornflower blue on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornflower_blue, so where do the RGB values for "cornflower blue" with the space come from? Is it a mistake or intentional?

Thanks, I edited to specify that it matches the X11 cornflower blue from that page.

A similar thing happened with "cadetblue" and "cadet blue", although with those the difference between them is much less, only #(95 158 160) vs. #(96 160 160), still within 1% of each other.

The X11 definition of cadet blue seems to use the #(95 158 160) version.

Per PR 16, it was decided that the differences should be maintained (for some reason). Can someone explain that in a better way, then close this issue? (since I am tempted to just make a PR to standardize to the X11 colors, but that is The Wrong Thing, I don't want others to make the same mistake.)

samth commented

The reason not to change is that existing programs (eg slides or image generators or web pages etc) might use the colors, and standardizing would change the behavior of those programs and make the results look different and potentially worse.