A personal job-seeking odyssey

• Authors: Nancy Collier
• Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics
• Year: 1997

Imagine a world in which the oranges that looked so beautiful an hour ago in the market have a completely different color when you get them out of the bag at home. Imagine, when you approach a traffic light, you cannot tell what color the light is. Imagine the colors of traffic lights changing from one block to the next one. Could you?If you can't, just go to your computer and launch your World Wide Web browser. Viewing a color document on the Web, you cannot be sure what the colors will be. Some of it has been deliberate; so that people with different viewing capabilities can still view documents. That is why, under most circumstances, the color of the background, text and hyperlinks are all left to the choice of the client (browser) side.However, the World Wide Web has become a major source of information. Not only does it provide a wealth of information for you to consume, but it also gives you the opportunity to be an information producer --- a publisher.This, in turn, gives you the opportunity to violate every known recommendation for effective color usage! Indeed, a large majority of information producers on the Web either have not bothered to study such recommendations, or have decided to deliberately ignore them.Color on the Web has experienced the same neglect as in other applications of visual computing such as computer graphics, imaging and visualization. In all these cases, color was ignored or neglected for a long period of time before interest mounted.A case in point is the default color most Web browsers assign to hyperlinks: blue. As is well known, our visual system has the lowest sensitivity to blue, making it the worst color for small samples, such as text and line graphics.There are many other examples of sites on the Web that burden the viewer with text in colors that are barely readable, with insufficient contrast between foreground and background, with annoying color and texture combinations and more.As the Web is becoming more and more a preferred choice of publishing --- either exclusively, or in conjunction with traditional publishing channels --- the demand for higher-quality graphics, imaging, and thus color, will increase. It will not be long before publishers --- and, remember, on the Web anybody can be a publisher --- seek to publish high-quality graphics, just like the glossy stuff you see in magazines. To date, there isn't enough color capability in standard Web technology to support this goal.This article briefly explores color issues on the World Wide Web. We summarize the main color capabilities that are available to us on the Web today; the summary is as short as the capabilities to date.We anticipate that, as with other visual computing applications, interest will eventually arise in using and supporting color in a more complete and effective way. We thus attempt to outline what we consider to be the needs that lie ahead to obtain the improved color support needed.