> On 22 Mar 2017, at 18:53, Jonas Wielicki <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 > <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.
Quite a complex problem you choose to solve there. Ideally you want a colour palette where the colours are as much different to the user as possible. Each user has a different impression on what colours are different and what look the same, considering things like colour blindness or dyschromatopsia <http://www.dict.cc/englisch-deutsch/dyschromatopsia.html>. The more colours you have in your colour palette, the more likely you’ll have very similar colours, which some users can’t distinguish. Ideally you want as many different colours as you have members in the room, so they are most distinguishable. However, what happens if people join/leave. If you generate a whole new palette all occupant colours change, but you would want occupant colours to be stable. Furthermore a sensible colour palette for nicknames depends on the colours of the chat theme. If the chat theme has a light green background it probably rules out some colours that would work fine in a white background chat theme. An interesting site regarding colour palette generation, with scientific background, I’ve found a couple years ago is http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/ <http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/> . Don’t know if you guys know about that. Cheers, Tobi
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