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

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