Color/Talk

White and Black are not truely colors, but the presence or absence of color.

When someone asks you what color snow is, you say white, not none. Black, white, and gray are not hues, but I think it is hard to say they are not colors.

---

The definition here is good, but the rest of this article (including the silly semantic dispute above) seems uninformed, culturally biased, and generally useless. The individual colors should have their own top-level pages as well, with dictionary-like entries and perhaps some coverage of cultural associations and specific uses.

A more thorough treatment should mention color spaces and standards, additive and subtractive mixing, digitization, optical effects, vision and perception in other animals, etc. The one standard reference on the non-biological science that everyone cites is The Reproduction of Colour by Dr. R. W. G. Hunt. Perhaps someone else can recommend a reference for the biological end of things? --LDC

---

Is cyan (500 nm) a "familiar" spectral color in other cultures? Not in my U.S. ROYGBIV experience, but perhaps elsewhere, pending the results of an exhaustive search I have moved it out of the spectrum table and placed it here for safe-keeping -- FretPorpTine

I think it should go on the table since it is definitely a pure spectral color. The more we list, the better; I don't see how it helps to omit some pure spectral colors. The Encyclopedia Britannica lists it, but omits indigo. --AxelBoldt

---

Why were the colors made subpages of the color page? I don't see any good reason for this at all. I'm going to change it if someone doesn't convince me not to. (Actually, I hope someone else will change it.) --LMS

---

That colored text on the previous page hurts my eyes. Just wondering if the following table (or some variant of it) would be better or worse. --KQ

red	650 nm
orange	600 nm
yellow	580 nm
green	550 nm
cyan	500 nm
blue	450 nm
indigo	420 nm
violet?	400 nm

I like it a lot better and will steal it right away :-) --AxelBoldt

You can't steal what someone gives freely. :-) --KQ

---

I like the table, but I think using numeric values rather than color names would be more consistent across browsers ("green", for example, is a deep forest green on my browser, not a pure rainbow green), and I'd make it a little clearer that the English color names are only approximations, not actual distinct bands (though our brains do chop it up for us perceptually sometimes--but that's another article). I'd do it this way (with colors at 30° hue intervals):

red	~650 nm
orange	~600 nm
yellow	~580 nm
yellow-green?	~550 nm
green	~500 nm
blue-green?	~480 nm
cyan	~450 nm
blue	~420 nm
blue/indigo	~400 nm
violet?	(mixture)
violet?/magenta?	(mixture)

--LDC

Violent and Magenta aren't really quite the same thing - it's a minor difference (like between indigo and blue), but magenta is not a spectral color.

I agree; this article is "color" not "electromagnetic spectrum". To me, that means it should focus on the human subjective experience of color. That's why I include all 360 degrees of the color wheel, and explicitly mention that the purples are mixtures rather than pure spectral colors. --LDC

But the table is about the rainbow spectrum of chromatic colors; maybe we should mention the color wheel and HSV space separately --Axel

---

I think that's an improvement, Lee. But it seems less than a 30° interval in the greens; the differences between green and either blue-green or yellow-green seems very subtle compared with the difference between any two other neighboring colors. I wonder if that's a problem with browsers on winME (I've tried Netscape 6.1, IE 5.5, and Opera 5.0) or with human perception. Does anyone know?

Oh, and in the top table Indigo does not show up in Opera 5.0. I guess they don't recognize that tag, which IIRC should mean it's not technically W3C compliant. --KQ

---

This one's better, but the wavelenghts seem to be a bit different from the ones we have now. I don't know which ones are right of course; I got the current ones from EB. --Axel

---

The "correctness" of the wavelengths will also vary with browser/video settings, so I might leave them out entirely (or put them into an article about the electromagnetic spectrum). My 11 colors are 30° intervals in HSV space converted to RGB; a different conversion might yield slightly different results. Until we get more info in here (like a CIE Lab chart), I think it's sufficient. --LDC

I'd prefer the (correct) wavelengths to be there. After all, how else can you define "blue" if not by giving its wavelength? --Axel

You misunderstand my point--the wavelengths are correct, for some monitor with certain settings on some video card on some coomputer with some software. It is not possible for it to be correct on all of them, because HTML doesn't specify colors as wavelengths--as well it shouldn't, because that's not how human eyes perceive it anyway. --LDC

I'm not so concerned about the HTML colors -- of course they will be off on most machines. But I want the right color names for the right wavelengths. So if we call it cyan, it should be listed with cyan's wavelength and some vaguely cyan-like HTML RGB mixture. Also, the table occurs in the physics section of the article, and spectral colors are cleanly defined physically by their wavelengths. --Axel