Hi, John. Great full moon shot at your site. Maybe it's just me, but looking at this particular shot it appears that the Man in the Moon is wearing shades and has his mouth open. No, no, all I've had today is coffee.
With respect to export compatibility with other programs, I must admit to some doubt as to how changing the way in which new colors are named could affect, positively or negatively, such interchanges. In modern languages, colors are defined in structures according to the color model chosen. For example, the type, or struct, defining a CMYK color would require four properties. That for an RGB value would require only three properties, as would an HSV value.
When a color of a particular type is used, a reference to it (a name) is dimensioned and an object of that type is instantiated. To the object, which is entirely ignorant either of how many instances of that type may be instantiated, or of what names have been assigned them, the name is immaterial. It doesn't matter if the name is automatically assigned to the reference, as was formerly done when a unique color was added to a drawing, or if it is user-assigned, as is required now. The name simply points to an instance of a color object defined by the struct appropriate to the current color model. These color objects may themselves be contained in an array or collection of currently in-use color definitions, depending upon the internal structure of the program.
When the time comes to export, the program will look up the struct as defined in the target program, convert the structs as defined in the host program, and do the necessary conversion between the two. The name given to a particular instance of a hue in the host program is immaterial to the target program, which may have an entirely different name for that hue, or indeed, may not have names for colors at all, or may provide for industry-standardized names (light blue, aqua, red, alice blue, etc.) but not for named colors.
Since named colors are precisely the same objects, whether the name is assigned by the user or automatically by the program at the time of instantiation, I see no advantage to be gained by imposing the need to create one's own name for named colors at the time of creation, rather than allowing the system to do so itself.
Sorry for the technical swamp, but I'm basically a programmer-type geek.
cheers,
paladin
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