type: utility

release: 0.0

priority: low

status: in development

documentation: http://www.adaptavist.com/display/jQuery/Colour+Library

demo: http://www.adaptavist.com/display/jQuery/Colour+Library+Demo

1 - Description:

A common set of functions for colour manipulation, that should be utilitised by UI widgets wherever required, and also for use independently of the UI core.

The ColorPicker widget will require a set of  functions for parsing, and writing CSS colour definitions, as well as convertions between colour spaces (ie. RGB, HSV, HSL, etc).

The Effects core uses a set of colour related functions internally, these could be promoted into this library for re-use elsewhere. 

2 - Visual Design:

N/A

3 - Functional Specifications/Requirements:

(Detailed description of how the script will be structured: defaults, options, architecture, extensibility, etc.)

4 - Markup & Style:

    N/A

5 - Latest version of plugin:

The current development efforts for this have been moved to github:

http://github.com/jollytoad/jquery.color

6 - Open issues being discussed

• Should all values be normalized to floating point 0..1 range?
• I believe it makes sense for Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Value, and Alpha channels.
• What about Red, Green and Blue, usually these are 0..255, but internal workings could be greatly simplified by also normalizing to 0..1 - and using 0..255 range just for parsing or writing.
• The current implementation use floating point 0..1 for HSV & Alpha, and integer 0..255 for RGB.

• How should we represent a colour?
• Array of channel values (eg [1,0,0])?
• An object that extends an Array?
• An object with properties named for each channel?
• The implementation uses an array of channel values - known as a colour tuple - channel values are retrieved using standard array syntax.

• Should we use methods or functions?
• $.color.RGBtoHSV([1,0,0]), $.color.toHex([1,0,0])
• $.Color('#fff').toHSV(), $.Color([1,0,0]).toString('hex')
• BOTH! The implementation defines functions in colour space namespaces (eg. jQuery.color.RGB) for use with colour tuples, AND a jQuery.Color object that sits on top of these.