Where do I get information about the support for 12 Bit color depth on the web?

Question

I want to know, when 12 Bit colors will be supported by the w3specs.

Currently webcolors are defined 8 Bit as sRGB (like: #FFFFFF or rgba(255,0,0,100) )

So I wonder, if there ever will be something like ** 12-Bit sRGB** where you define colors like:

• X#FFF FFF FFF - instead of #FF FF FF
• Xrgba(255*16,0,0,100) - instead of rgba(255,0,0,100)

Supporting just 10 Bit (what is actually just needed by uppcoming displays), would be quite impossible cause of the poor 8+2 Bit format, so the color white would be #8FF, which is quite ugly.

I have already tried to find this information in a w3Spec, but I wasn't lucky.

Maybe someone can show me a link to the proper w3Spec, or Working Group

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Why i need this?

• I want to enable the canvas element to support 10Bit/12Bit colors, this would be nice for several webapps like photo editing and 3D-games, it also would be nice just for websites, to use 12 Bit in PNG files, or virtually seemless color transitions.

Answer 1

Looking at css-color level 4 it seems that the spec is no longer limited to srgb.

Wich is a bit weird becouse most screens are still tuned to srgb. So it might be helpfull to manuelly set an output space?

Also if the gradients ects are independent of an actual color space this adds to confusion. also what is the cause of all the banding on the gradients. if there is 12 bit color i don`t c a reason except that now the gradient is picking colors outside of the gamut my screen is tuned at causing gaps in what it can display. something is misconfigured somewhere and it should be fixed.

Answer 2

I looked up the w3specs and the css mailing list, and you already can use 10 Bit colors, by writing somthing like:

rgb(0.1%,0.1%,0.1%) the browser will then decide, if it will round down to 0%

CSS Color Level 4 will also extend rgb() and rgba() to accept a <number>, where an <integer> was used, so that you can write:

rgb(0.25, 0.25, 0.25), which may or may not be rounded to rgb(0, 0, 0)

-- Simon Sapin, on CSS-color Mailing List

For further information read CSS-Color Level 4 - Editor’s Draft, 7 October 2013