Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Here's a few sites I found that ask the user to select colours.
http://www.haymespaint.com.au/haymes/colourcentre/
http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/
I can't figure out how any of those would benefit from the new input
type. Can you? Are there any other sites that would?
These are some rather contrived examples. The first is asking users to
select real-world (i.e. paint) colours, while this proposal was for
screen colours in RGB format. (At least, that was my understanding based
on the reference to six-digit hex encoding.)
The other two are specialized colour exploration tools aimed at designers.
The uses I had in mind (and, I suspect, the original poster too) were
systems where colour isn't *the main point* of the application, but
where it is still necessary for some reason.
My imagination here is largely limited to content management, blogging
or other similar applications:
* LiveJournal[1] allows users to customize their "journal" pages in a
number of ways, including changing the colour scheme. LiveJournal
currently implements its own colour picker which has support for
entering either RGB or HSL values or picking them from a rather-dubious
spectrum selector thingy. (Sadly, this is only accessible to logged-in
users.)
* Various in-browser WYSIWYG editors, such as FCK[1], allow the
end-user to choose colours for their text, background and table cells.
While I think most here would agree that WYSIWYG editors are not ideal,
they *are* out there and people used them. It'd be nice if they all
didn't need to implement their own colour picker with a different UI.
Both of these (which I guess you could argue are two examples of the
same use-case) would benefit from reduced development time due to not
needing to develop or source a DHTML colour picker, improved
accessibility due to reduced dependency on JavaScript, and a more
intuitive UI because the picker would be consistent across applications
and (hopefully) consistent with pickers in desktop apps on the same
platform.
[1] http://www.livejournal.com/
[2] http://www.fckeditor.net/
