One thing I have always wished for was a good, simple way to export the list of colors used in a format that was friendly to the graphic designer and the web designer. RGB in hex and decimal and perhaps percent, HSV or HSB or HSL (I just wish there were agreement on the definition and terms and syntax) because HSV/HSB/HSL is very useful for color harmonies and color palettes, IMHO. CMYK also, because a graphic designer and a printer need those. -- How much easier it would be for workflow to have a drawing's colors stated in a text file for reference, something that could be shared by the CSS file and thus the web pages, shared throughout the project. -- Including the color names. How much nicer it would be, in my opinion, to refer in the .css to something like MegaCorp:Orange (see, there's a domain identifier and a color name there).

This would be on a per-project or per-drawing-file basis, an external file that could be shared by a web or graphic design project, much like a separate (external) .css file may be used.

Actually, I wish CSS could offer this. IMHO, it would be a boon to future CSS and SVG.

I envision that as something like:



Thereafter, a designer could refer within the CSS or SVG to that color by name, such as:



Admittedly, that may seem like a trivial usage. But remember, your project might have tens or hundreds of uses of big-project:Orange for various reasons. Add in a whole palette of colors for particular, sensible, meaningful uses within a site full of pages and images (in SVG, PNG, and so on) and suddenly, the ability to refer to big-project:Orange by a human-friendly and human-meaningful name is not so trivial.

I suppose a way to alias a color definition to one or more alias names would be useful too. Imagine uses like big-project:highlight-back, big-project:highlight-fore, big-project:sidebar-stop-3, big-project:main-accent, and so on;

Well, most of your discussion is beyond my current understanding. But from what I understand of the first paragraph, I think it's a great idea! And I would also add that having at least some of this info available from the Inkscape window would be helpful as well. A list of all the colors used in an image, in the various forms (hex, code, name). Just because it can be frustrating to have to select each color (or pass eyedrop tool over it) to retrieve its hex, code or name, for use in another project.

I realized after posting that, two things:

First, I need to look up how to submit the idea for user named colors to the CSS workgroup committee as a proposal.

Second, I'm used to Freehand and trying to learn Illustrator's (to me) frustrating interface. If Inkscape could have a way to view and save/print a report of colors used, such as to help sync projects' color schemes, as well as to inspect colors used in a given element or object, it would be a real boon. For instance, the colors used in a gradient or a complex graphic style.

I haven't forgotten about this color-list user-defined color names idea. Life got out of whack, but may finally be settling down some. I've put the idea on my to do list. -- My thought is, this could be a useful feature for SVG and CSS in some future versions. I just need to write up the idea and present it. No knowing if it'll be accepted, though. When I do, I'll post it online so people here can read it also.

If you want to name colors have a look at less http://lesscss.org/