Comment by mattdesl
3 days ago
It does a pretty good job at emulating CAM16 with a fraction of the parameters, computational complexity, and processing; it’s no wonder it was adopted by CSS.
I don’t know what you mean by “not being linked to any perceptual color space” - it is derived from CAM16 & CIEDE2000, pretty similar in ethos to other spaces like ITP and the more recently published sUCS.
There’s also tons of discussion on w3c GitHub about OKLab, and it’s evolved in many ways since the original blog post such as improved matrices, new lightness estimate and OKHSV/OKHSL, and very useful cusp & gamut approximations.
I have a hard time seeing how it’s a nightmare in practice!
Because it is a matmul best-effort approximation of a perceptual color space, not a perceptual one, and in my experience that's a significant difference when deployed and for design. YMMV. :)
I cringe myself, it sounds like a nitpick, but it's an extremely significant upgrade in every case.
Most concretely, if I use actual L*, design can use palettes linked to L* and vary hue / colorfulness while meeting any contrast standard.