Abstract: | This specification provides a set of algorithms to consistently generate colors given a string. The string can be a nickname, a JID or any other piece of information. All entities adhering to this specification generate the same color for the same string, which provides a consistent user experience across platforms. |
Author: | Jonas Wielicki |
Copyright: | © 1999 – 2017 XMPP Standards Foundation. SEE LEGAL NOTICES. |
Status: | Experimental |
Type: | Standards Track |
Version: | 0.4 |
Last Updated: | 2017-11-29 |
WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.
1. Introduction
2. Requirements
3. Use Cases
3.1. Generating a color
3.2. Adding colors to participants of a conversation
3.3. Auto-Generating Avatars
4. Business Rules
5. Algorithms
5.1. Angle generation
5.2. Corrections for Color Vision Deficiencies
5.2.1. Red/Green-blindness
5.2.2. Blue-blindness
5.3. CbCr generation
5.4. CbCr to RGB
5.5. Adapting the Color for specific Background Colors
5.6. RGB to YCbCr
5.7. Conversion of an RGB color palette to a CbCr color palette
5.8. Mapping of a CbCr color to closest palette color
6. Implementation Notes
6.1. Gamma Correction
6.2. Background Color Correction
7. Accessibility Considerations
8. Security Considerations
9. Design Considerations
9.1. Other variants of the YCbCr color space
9.2. Hue-Saturation-Value/Lightness color space
9.3. Palette-based and context-aware coloring
9.4. Choice of mixing function in angle generation
9.5. Palette-mapping function
10. IANA Considerations
11. XMPP Registrar Considerations
12. Acknowledgements
13. Test Vectors and Constants
13.1. Constants for YCbCr (BT.601)
13.2. Test Vectors
13.2.1. No Color Vision Deficiency correction
13.2.2. With Red/Green-blindness correction
13.2.3. With Blue-blindness correction
13.3. Test Vectors for mapping to 216 color palette
13.3.1. No Color Vision Deficiency correction
13.3.2. With Red/Green-blindness correction
13.3.3. With Blue-blindness correction
Appendices
A: Document Information
B: Author Information
C: Legal Notices
D: Relation to XMPP
E: Discussion Venue
F: Requirements Conformance
G: Notes
H: Revision History
Colors provide a valuable visual cue to recognize shapes. Recognition of colors works much faster than recognition of text. Together with the length and overall shape of a piece of text (such as a nickname), a color provides a decent amount of entropy to distinguish a reasonable amount of entities, without having to actually read the text.
Clients have been using randomly or deterministically chosen colors for users in multi-user situations for a long time already. However, since there has been no standard for how this is implemented, the experience differs across platforms. The goal of this XEP is to provide a uniform, platform-independent, stateless and easy-to-implement way to map arbitrary bytestrings to colors, as well as give recommendations how this is applied to color names of participants in conversations, roster entries and other pieces of text.
To allow cross-client use, it is important that the color scheme can be adapted to different environments. This specification provides means to adapt colors to different background colors as well as Color Vision Deficiencies.
In no way is the system presented in this specification a replacement for names. It only serves as an additional visual aid.
The color generation mechanism should provide the following features:
To generate a color from a string of text, the follownig algorithms are applied in order:
Implementations may colorize the participants of a conversation with an individual color to make them easier to distinguish.
In such cases, the color SHOULD be generated as described in the Generating a color section. The input used SHOULD be, in descending order of preference, (a) the nickname from the conversation, (b) the bare JID.
Implementations may want to show a picture in connection with a contact even if the contact does not have an avatar defined (e.g. via User Avatar (XEP-0084) [1]).
In such cases, auto-generating an avatar SHOULD happen as follows:
Input: An identifier, encoded as octets of UTF-8 (RFC 3269 [3]).
Output: Angle in the CbCr plane.
Note: The goal of this algorithm is to convert arbitrary text into a scalar value which can then be used to calculate a color. As it happens, the CbCr plane of the YCbCr space determines the color (while Y merely defines the lightness); thus, an angle in the CbCr plane serves as a good scalar value to select a color.
Input: Angle in the CbCr plane.
Output: Angle in the CbCr plane.
Note: This algorithm will re-map the angle to map it away from ranges which can not be distinguished by people with the respective Color Vision Deficiencies.
Take the angle modulo π.
Note: the same effect can be achieved by forcing the most-significant bit of the angle to zero before converting to a float in Angle generation. This avoids having to perform a floating-point modulo operation.
Subtract π/2 from the angle, take the result modulo π and add π/2.
Note: the same effect can be achieved by setting the most-significant bit of the angle to the inverse of the second-most-significant bit before conversion to floating point in Angle generation. This avoids having to perform a floating-point modulo operation.
Input: Angle in the CbCr plane, from the previous algorithm.
Output: Values for Cb and Cr in the YCbCr BT.601 [5] color space in the range from -0.5 to 0.5.
Form a vector from the angle and project it to edges of a quad in 2D space with edge length 1 around (0, 0). The resulting coordinates are Cb and Cr:
float cr = sin(angle); float cb = cos(angle); float factor; if (abs(cr) > abs(cb)) { factor = 0.5 / abs(cr); } else { factor = 0.5 / abs(cb); } cb = cb * factor; cr = cr * factor;
Input: Values for Cb and Cr in the YCbCr BT.601 [5] color space in the range from -0.5 to 0.5; Value for Y.
Output: Values for Red (R), Green (G) and Blue (B) in the RGB color space in the range from 0 to 1.
Note: The recommended value for Y is 0.732. See Gamma Correction for a discussion on the choice of Y.
float r = 2*(1 - KR)*cr + y; float b = 2*(1 - KB)*cb + y; float g = (y - KR*r - KB*b)/KG;
See Constants for YCbCr (BT.601) for the values of KR, KG and KB.
Input: RGB values for the color to adapt (Ri, Gi, Bi) and for the background color to adapt to (Rb, Gb, Bb), in the range from 0 to 1 each.
Output: Values for Red (Rc), Green (Gc) and Blue (Bc) in the RGB color space in the range from 0 to 1.
rb_inv = 1-rb; gb_inv = 1-gb; bb_inv = 1-bb;
rc = 0.2*rb_inv + 0.8*ri; gc = 0.2*gb_inv + 0.8*gi; bc = 0.2*bb_inv + 0.8*bi;
Input: Values for Red (R), Green (G) and Blue (B) in the RGB color space in the range from 0 to 1.
Output: Values for Cb and Cr in the YCbCr BT.601 [5] color space in the range from -0.5 to 0.5; Value for Y.
Calculate Y, Cb and Cr according to BT.601:
y = KR*r + (1 - KR - KB)*g + KB*b; cb = (b - y) / (1 - KB) / 2 cr = (r - y) / (1 - KR) / 2
See Constants for YCbCr (BT.601) for the values of KR, KG and KB.
Input: A set of RGB colors (each component from 0 to 1).
Output: A mapping from angles (from 0 to 2π) to RGB colors.
Note: when the algorithm finishes, the mapping maps angles (rounded to two decimal places) to the R, G, B triples which come closest to the desired color and lightness.
Convert Cb and Cr to an angle:
magn = sqrt(Cb**2 + Cr**2) if magn > 0: cr /= magn cb /= magn angle = atan2(cr, cb) % (2*pi)
Here, % is the floating point modulo operator. Since atan2 may return negative values, it is used to put the values into the range from 0 to 2π. ** is the exponentiation operator (cb**2 is thus cb squared).
Implementations are free to choose a representation for palette colors different from R, G, B triplets. The exact representation does not matter, as long as it can be converted to an angle in the CbCr plane accordingly.
Input: (a) A mapping which maps angles to R, G, B triplets and (b) a color to map to the closest palette color as angle alpha.
Output: A palette color as R, G, B triplet.
Note: See Conversion of an RGB color palette to a CbCr color palette on how to convert an R, G, B triplet or a CbCr pair to an angle.
D = min((alpha - beta) % (2*pi), (beta - alpha) % (2*pi))
Implementations are free to choose a representation for palette colors different from R, G, B triplets. The exact representation does not matter, as long as it can be converted to an angle in the CbCr plane accordingly.
An implementation may choose a different value for Y depending on whether the sink for the R, G and B values expects Gamma Encoded or Gamma Decoded values. The recommended default of 0.732 is 0.5 to the power of 0.45, that is, a Gamma Encoded 0.5.
Modifications to Y SHOULD NOT be used to correct for bright/dark backgrounds. Implementations SHOULD instead use the algorithm described in Adapting the Color for specific Background Colors for that.
An implementation which shows the generated colors on a colored background SHOULD apply Adapting the Color for specific Background Colors. If the background is not uniformly colored, it is up to the implementation to determine an appropriate surrogate background color to correct against.
If an implementation shows the generated colors on a grayscale (including white and black) background, it MAY apply the background color correction algorithm. It is RECOMMENDED to always apply the algorithm if the background color is changed dynamically, to avoid discontinuities between grayscale and colored backgrounds.
Implementations SHOULD use the same background color for all generated colors. If this is not feasible, implementations SHOULD use the same background color for all generated colors within the same GUI control (for example, within a conversation and within the roster).
As outlined above, implementations SHOULD offer the Red/Green-Blindness and Blue-Blindness corrections as defined in the Corrections for Color Vision Deficiencies section. Users SHOULD be allowed to choose between:
The last option is useful for users with monochromatic view or who find colors distracting.
Some sources on the internet indicate that people with Color Vision Deficiencies may profit from having larger areas of color to be able to recognize them. This should be taken into consideration when selecting font weights and line widths for colored parts.
This specification extracts a bit more information from an entity and shows it alongside the existing information to the user. As the algorithm is likely to produce different colors for look-alikes (see Best Practices to Prevent JID Mimicking (XEP-0165) [6] for examples) in JIDs, it may add additional protection against attacks based on those.
Due to the limited set of distinguishable colors and only extracting 16 bits of the hash function output, possible Color Vision Deficiencies and/or use of palettes, entities MUST NOT rely on colors being unique in any context.
This section provides an overview of design considerations made while writing this specification. It shows alternatives which have been considered, and eventually rejected.
The other common YCbCr variants, BT.709 and BT.2020, do not achieve a brightness across the color space as uniform as BT.601 [5] does. Adapting the Y value for uniform luminosity across the range for CbCr would have complicated the algorithm with little or no gain.
The HSV and HSL color spaces fail to provide uniform luminosity with fixed value/lightness and saturation parameters. Adapting those parameters for uniform luminosity across the hue range would have complicated the algorithm with litte to no gain.
Given a fixed-size and finite palette of colors, it would be possible to ensure that, until the number of entities to color exceeds the number of colors, no color collisions happen.
There are issues with this approach when the set of entities is dynamic. In such cases, it is possible that an entity changes its associated color (for example by re-joining a colored group chat), which defeats the original purpose.
In addition, more state needs to be taken into account, increasing the complexity of choosing a color.
This specification needs to collapse an arbitrarily long string into just a few bits (the angle in the CbCr plane). To do so, SHA-1 (RFC 3174 [4]) is used.
CRC32 and Adler32 have been considered as faster alternatives. Downsides of these functions:
SHA-1 is widely available. From a security point of view, the exact choice of hash function does not matter here, since it is truncated to 16 bits. At this length, any cryptographic hash function is weak.
The palette-mapping algorithm operates on angles only and disregards the Y value except if the angles match. This has the downside that the brightness is not equal over the range of the palette mapped colors.
The alternative would be to require Y to be close to the target Y. This has several issues:
For the sake of having more colors available, the given algorithm was chosen which prefers many colors with hue conformance over fewer colors with hue and lightness conformance.
This document requires no interaction with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) [7].
This document requires no interaction with the XMPP Registrar [8].
Thanks to Klaus Herberth, Daniel Gultsch, Georg Lukas, Tobias Markmann, Christian Schudt, and Marcus Waldvogel for their input and feedback on this document.
Throughout the document, the constants KR, KG and KB are used. They are defined in BT.601 [5] as:
KR = 0.299 KG = 0.587 KB = 0.114
This section holds test vectors for the different configurations. The test vectors are provided as Comma Separated Values. Strings are enclosed by single quotes ('). The first line contains a header. Each row contains, in that order, the original text, the text encoded as UTF-8 as hexadecimal octets, the angle in radians, and the Cb, Cr, Red, Green, and Blue values.
text,hextext,angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',5.711682,0.500000,-0.321546,0.281,0.790,1.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',3.654901,-0.500000,-0.281855,0.337,1.000,0.000 '😺','f09f98ba',5.780519,0.500000,-0.274885,0.347,0.756,1.000 'council','636f756e63696c',6.283089,0.500000,-0.000048,0.732,0.560,1.000
text,hextext,angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',2.570089,-0.500000,0.321546,1.000,0.674,0.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',0.513308,0.500000,0.281855,1.000,0.359,1.000 '😺','f09f98ba',2.638926,-0.500000,0.274885,1.000,0.708,0.000 'council','636f756e63696c',3.141497,-0.500000,0.000048,0.732,0.904,0.000
text,hextext,angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',2.570089,-0.500000,0.321546,1.000,0.674,0.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',3.654901,-0.500000,-0.281855,0.337,1.000,0.000 '😺','f09f98ba',2.638926,-0.500000,0.274885,1.000,0.708,0.000 'council','636f756e63696c',3.141497,-0.500000,0.000048,0.732,0.904,0.000
The used palette can be generated by sampling the RGB cube evenly with six samples on each axis (resulting in 210 colors (grayscales are excluded)). The resulting palette is commonly known as the palette of so-called "Web Safe" colors.
Instead of the cb and cr values, the test vectors contain the best_angle as found in the palette.
text,hextext,angle,best_angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',5.711682,5.690000,0.000,0.400,1.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',3.654901,3.640000,0.400,1.000,0.000 '😺','f09f98ba',5.780519,5.770000,0.400,0.600,1.000 'council','636f756e63696c',6.283089,0.040000,0.200,0.000,1.000
text,hextext,angle,best_angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',2.570089,2.550000,1.000,0.600,0.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',0.513308,0.500000,0.600,0.000,1.000 '😺','f09f98ba',2.638926,2.630000,1.000,0.800,0.400 'council','636f756e63696c',3.141497,3.180000,0.800,1.000,0.000
text,hextext,angle,best_angle,cb,cr,r,g,b 'Romeo','526f6d656f',2.570089,2.550000,1.000,0.600,0.000 'juliet@capulet.lit','6a756c69657440636170756c65742e6c6974',3.654901,3.640000,0.400,1.000,0.000 '😺','f09f98ba',2.638926,2.630000,1.000,0.800,0.400 'council','636f756e63696c',3.141497,3.180000,0.800,1.000,0.000
Series: XEP
Number: 0392
Publisher: XMPP Standards Foundation
Status:
Experimental
Type:
Standards Track
Version: 0.4
Last Updated: 2017-11-29
Approving Body: XMPP Council
Dependencies: None
Supersedes: None
Superseded By: None
Short Name: colors
Source Control:
HTML
This document in other formats:
XML
PDF
Email:
jonas@wielicki.name
JabberID:
jonas@wielicki.name
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is defined in the XMPP Core (RFC 6120) and XMPP IM (RFC 6121) specifications contributed by the XMPP Standards Foundation to the Internet Standards Process, which is managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force in accordance with RFC 2026. Any protocol defined in this document has been developed outside the Internet Standards Process and is to be understood as an extension to XMPP rather than as an evolution, development, or modification of XMPP itself.
The primary venue for discussion of XMPP Extension Protocols is the <standards@xmpp.org> discussion list.
Discussion on other xmpp.org discussion lists might also be appropriate; see <http://xmpp.org/about/discuss.shtml> for a complete list.
Errata can be sent to <editor@xmpp.org>.
The following requirements keywords as used in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119: "MUST", "SHALL", "REQUIRED"; "MUST NOT", "SHALL NOT"; "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED"; "SHOULD NOT", "NOT RECOMMENDED"; "MAY", "OPTIONAL".
1. XEP-0084: User Avatar <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0084.html>.
2. XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html>.
3. RFC 3269: UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3269>.
4. RFC 3174: US Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1) <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3174>.
5. BT.601: Studio encoding parameters of digital television for standard 4:3 and wide screen 16:9 aspect ratios <https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BT.601-7-201103-I/en>
6. XEP-0165: Best Practices to Prevent JID Mimicking <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0165.html>.
7. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the central coordinator for the assignment of unique parameter values for Internet protocols, such as port numbers and URI schemes. For further information, see <http://www.iana.org/>.
8. The XMPP Registrar maintains a list of reserved protocol namespaces as well as registries of parameters used in the context of XMPP extension protocols approved by the XMPP Standards Foundation. For further information, see <https://xmpp.org/registrar/>.
Note: Older versions of this specification might be available at http://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/
Use different formulas for Color Vision Deficiency correction, as suggested by Marcus Waldvogel.
Update test vectors.
Clarify generation of the angle.
Prioritize nicknames over bare JIDs.
Add rationale for new palette mapping algorithm introduced in 0.3.
(jwi)Fix wording in angle generation section which did still use CRC32. Rework palette mapping after with implementation experience.
(jwi)Move to SHA-1 as mixing function; Properly reference BT.601 and include constants in text; Prefer bare JID over roster name when selecting the hash function input; Editing.
(jwi)Accepted as Experimental by Council.
(XEP Editor: jwi)First draft.
(jwi)END