CSS Color 4 is now widely implemented. But it has been a long and bumpy ride! Why did it take so long, and why did it finally succeed?

So, CSS Color 4 adds Wide Color Gamut colors to CSS. But what is a gamut, anyway?

The gamut of a color space is the range of colors that can be represented, given the constraint that color component values can't be negative or greater than 100%.

That is a complete definition but if you really want to understand, in depth, what that means, the rest of this blog post is for you.

Related: Lea's blog post for the release of color.js

It has taken Lea and I far too long – there is always something more that really should be added, always some conversion that really needs an authoritive set of data to validate our code against – but we finally decided, time to actually release Color.js.

By which, I guess, we mean removing the polite figleaf that said, “whoops you stumbled on an unreleased thing, please be careful and lower your expectations”.

Because people are already using it to make demos and to check other color conversion code against (this includes some browser implementations of CSS Color 4 and CSS Color 5).