The web is about to become way more colorful!
A few months ago I was telling one of my zoomer friends about the first computer I got back in the 90s. The loud mechanical keyboard, the deafening cooling system, and yes — the big and bulky CRT monitor.
Back then, most monitors were the same size. Most people had a 15 inch screen, and some people splurged and got themselves a 17 inch one. But for people designing user interfaces, the vast majority of monitors had the same 4:3 aspect ratio, making the task of designing a website way more straightforward than it is today, since everybody was using a screen that had the same space.
And then Steve said, ‘Let there be an iPhone.’
As we entered the new millennia, things changed very quickly. Smartphones were invented; tablet computers and flat screen computer monitors in all shapes and sizes became ubiquitous.
I distinctly remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world. In one of his demos, he was browsing the New York Times’ website on Safari — zooming in by tapping on different sections of the page so he could read it. This ended up becoming the way we interacted with the internet on smaller devices for a few years.
What happened is that display technology developed so quickly, and web technology didn’t keep up.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2012 when CSS media queries became a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommended standard, which allowed us for the first time to develop responsive websites that would work on all devices regardless of the screen size.
For the past few years we’ve been finding ourselves in a very similar situation — where display technology is outpacing web technology once again.
Back in 1996, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard created the sRGB standard that was to be used on monitors, printers, and the internet. It was subsequently standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission and has since been a standard default color space for the internet. This was way more than sufficient back then, since all monitors had gamuts (the range of possible colors) way smaller than sRGB.
This is not the case anymore and hasn’t been for quite some time. Unless you have a very old monitor, the screen on which you are now reading is able to display around 50% more colors than can be found within the range of sRGB, and we haven’t had access to these colors on the web up until now.
Last week, Safari 15 was released, and with it, the LCH and LAB color spaces from the CSS Color Module Level 4 specification. For the first time we are able to access all of the colors our monitors are able to display, all the while giving developers better tools to develop for the web of the future where users are increasingly going to expect the web to adapt to their desired color scheme.
While Apple has in the last few years not been on the forefront of pioneering new web technologies, it is perhaps not very surprising that they are the company to be the first to introduce this specification. Given that Apple makes most of its money selling top of the line personal computers and smartphones, it makes sense they would want their customers to be able to fully utilize those beautiful and vivid retina screens.
I for one am looking forward to a more colorful and vibrant web!