There is an old Russian fable where Okhsv and Okhsl are on a rowboat and Okhsv says to Okhsl, “What are the known shortcomings of HSL and HSV color pickers in design applications?” I kid, I kid. But really, what are they?
Björn Ottosson shows the two classics:
Despite color picking playing a big role in a lot of applications, the design of color pickers isn’t a particularly well researched topic. While some variation exist in the widgets themselves, the choice of HSL or HSV is mostly taken for granted, with only a few exceptions.
Is their dominance well deserved or would it be possible to create better alternatives?
It’s all rather above my head, but I certainly support the idea of researching and exploring things that so many of us just take for granted. There is a whole playground comparing different possibilities. It’s not so much about the UI/UX of the picker itself, but how the range of colors is expressed in the picker area.
A really useful application for Okhsl could be generating color palettes, like for Material Design or Tailwind.
This explains why the existing theme generators that spit out 10 shades of each color seem to have inconsistent results.