Re: syntax for the color property

[rms]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 10:08:27PM +0100, Frodo Looijaard wrote:
> Paul Rohr wrote:
> > You need to discriminate between two disjoint sets of color specifications:
> >   - six characters that look like hex
> >   - a discrete match in some lookup table
> Ehm, stupid question maybe, but why is the current way of specifying
> colors (through hex RGB) not good enough in all cases? Why would you
> ever want `blue' in the fileformat, instead of `00ff00'? I just don't
> see any advantage in this. I mean, the whole file format is low-level
> nitty-gritty stuff, so why add abstraction only for color?

Simple:

  what's the advantage of XML if it's not human readable?
  but I agree abiword's xml format may become too complex for human edition, though, 
thus validating the stupid question.
  I also tend to think that it's more efficient to save it as RGB color codes, that to 
add extra parsing to the color property.

hugs, rms