Limes ARE Lime Green
It's sometimes interesting to think about the decisions that went into the software that we use. There is an interesting article or two on the design decisions surrounding the Start menu in Windows Vista.
These large design decisions are very interesting and have far-reaching impacts. It's fascinating to me to think about everything that is involved in deciding what word should describe something or what color a button should be and what implications that decision has. And then you start to think about the sum total of all of those little decisions and their overall impact on software. It's really mind-boggling.
I became curious about one such strange decision when I was trying to pick a color for a custom activity designer for a Windows Workflow Foundation custom activity. Only programmers will see this activity, so I wasn't particularly concerned with the overall aesthetics. I decided on a whim that I would shoot for some sort of green since I hadn't seen too many green activities yet.
I looked through the list of system colors predefined in the System.Drawing.Color structure, when I spotted this:
Lime and Lime Green? What in the heck is the difference?
| Lime |
Lime Green |
| |
|
| #00ff00 |
#32cd32 |
Ok, so they are different, but why do we need two different colors for limes? Aren't limes green (most of the time), so isn't LimeGreen redundant? I did a quick check on the Intertron to verify this.
A short search revealed that, by and large, limes are indeed green. Now, of course I don't expect that the Windows system colors will have such specific differentiation you can get when buying expensive designer paint ("Nairobi at Dusk" and "Long John Red" are just a few of the fun names you'll find in the Ralph Lauren paint palette), but seriously... lime and lime green? When was this decision made, by whom, and why? I did my best to find out.
The colors that are predefined here are nearly identical to those used by the X Window System. Why on earth would Microsoft choose to predefine a set of 140 colors so that they would match up with those chosen in a Unix GUI framework written sometime around when I was born?
Well, as it so happens, the first browsers (Mosaic, Netscape, etc) were first developed for X Windows and then ported over to Windows. Since web developers had already started making HTML pages with color descriptions like "Saddlebrown" and "Red" from the X11 color names, the colors had to come over to the Windows version, too. This led to a semi-standardization of named colors on the Internet which has been used in all browsers since, including Internet Explorer.
So, it follows that when the writers of the .NET Framework were coming up with a set of named colors to use, they would use something pervasive. I'm definitely thankful for this.
How did the X11 color set come to include "Lime" and "LimeGreen"? Who knows! X Windows has been contributed to by many different parties and there was probably very little discussion about the overall strategy for color names.
For me as a developer, two green colors with the label "lime" attached to them is confusing, but the decision was made so that compatibility with the web would be easy to preserve. Even though usability suffers a little bit, the ends probably justify the means.
I think "LimeGreen" is closer to the color of a lime, but maybe that's just me.
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