Dear list,

During the Chemnitzer Linux Tage, Georg, Daniel and I had some discussion on 
the topic of how to generate "randomised" colours for use in XMPP clients. 
Uses include but are not limited to: Nicknames (this is already done by many 
clients, but inconsistently), Individual roster entries, User accounts, MUCs 
and MIXes and so on. That idea alone isn’t new.

The idea is to standardise how those colours are generated accross clients. 
The advantage is that a user can quickly recognise all of their contacts, no 
matter which device they’re on. The recognition of colours is way faster than 
names. Combined with geometrical features like length of name, it often, from 
my experience, is a sufficient identifier to be unique even in crowded MUCs.

So we threw together our thoughts on that matter in a wiki article 
<https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Contact_Colors>. Georg came up with using the YCbCr 
colour space for sampling the colours, and we’re pretty happy with the results 
so far. It’s trivial to adapt the lightness of the colours to the environment.

We’d like to have input from other client developers. We think that this is a 
good idea which can subtly improve user experience; implementations which 
already have a "randomised" colouring can easily upgrade.


We would like to have input from other client developers, especially on those 
things explicitly marked as "open for debate", but other suggestions for an 
easy-to-implement colouring scheme are also welcome.


We might turn this into a ProtoXEP at some later point---although I’m 
personally not sure this is XEP material.


best regards,
Jonas

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