Styling guidelines on 6/7 seem incorrect entirely

[joshgoebel]

Lets take a look

Colors base00 to base07 are typically variations of a shade and run from darkest to lightest. ... In order to create a dark theme, colors base00 to base07 should span from dark to light. For a light theme, these colours should span from light to dark.

base00 - Default Background
base01 - Lighter Background (Used for status bars, line number and folding marks)
base02 - Selection Background
base03 - Comments, Invisibles, Line Highlighting
base04 - Dark Foreground (Used for status bars)
base05 - Default Foreground, Caret, Delimiters, Operators
base06 - Light Foreground (Not often used)
base07 - Light Background (Not often used)

And as we often see illustrated in yaml (commentary mine):

base00: "090300" #  ---- DARKEST BG
base01: "3a3432" #  --- less dark BG
base02: "4a4543" #  -- medium bg
base03: "5c5855" #  - brightest bg
base04: "807d7c" #  + dark foreground
base05: "a5a2a2" #  ++ default foreground
base06: "d6d5d4" #  +++ brighter foreground
base07: "f7f7f7" #  ++++ very bright foreground

But this directly contradicts the list where base07 is listed as "Light Background"... should it not be "Brightest/very light Foreground"? Most of the published schemes (not all) seem to run with this lighest to darkest idea, paying attention to the instructions rather than the exactly base07 and base06 labels.

Proposal

base06 - Light Foreground (Not often used)
base07 - Brightest Foreground (Not often used)

[joshgoebel]

Of note: Base24 has fixed this in their own style guide (which largely reflect ours for the first 16 colors):

Their wording:

base07 - The Lightest Foreground (Not often used)

[joshgoebel]

Now that @chriskempson is back I was going to submit a PR over there to get his opinion on this issue (and hopefully fix it there as well), but sadly since I'm blocked it seems I can't even fork or make a PR on his repos. Blocking is a heavy hammer. 😕

[belak]

It looks like in base16-emacs I'm using it for both foreground and background, but it's more common in the foreground.

I'm still a bit hesitant to officially change the styling guide, but it does seem like this is how it's been used already. I think this seems like a reasonable change.

[JamyGolden]

Yeah this is commonly used "incorrectly" so not really a breaking change in a sense. Good change 👍

[joshgoebel]

Great, it sounds like we agree this is a bug. My base17 spec already fixes it. I'm not sure a PR is needed here since I'm still confused as to which style spec is housed in this repo... it's no longer Base16 (since Chris owns that) or at least it wouldn't be if we changed it (right now we could say it's a copy of base16)... but it's not yet Base17 either... so we're in this weird middle time.

So I'm inclined to leave this open a while longer, but at least we know the fix. I'll tag this with Base17.

eah this is commonly used "incorrectly">

Is there an "incorrect" though since the spec contradicts itself? :-)