March 20, 2026
Color beef, extra decimal drama
Too Much Color
Dev says 3 digits per color is plenty—Internet flexes super-eyes and roasts his site
TLDR: A dev says three decimal places in color codes are enough and built tools to prove it. Commenters turned it into an eye-test flex, debated rare super-seers, and roasted his minimalist site—raising a bigger question: ship fast with rounded colors or chase pixel-perfect precision.
A CSS developer just dropped a hot take: you don’t need more than three decimal places in color codes, ever. He built a new minifier and test suite, and after crunching eye-science math (think “Just Noticeable Difference,” aka how small a change your eyes can spot), he argues anything beyond 3 decimals is wasted. Minifiers should chop the extras so you don’t have to—case closed, right? Not on the internet. The comments turned into a flex-off and a roast session. One user turned it into a scoreboard with a “how sharp are your eyes” challenge, posting their best score and daring everyone to beat it with #WhatsMyJND. Meanwhile, the “actually” brigade arrived to say tetrachromats—ultra-rare people with four color receptors—might notice those tiny differences. The rest? They were here for the jokes. A top quip mocked the author’s minimalist site: the “color expert” with a monochrome homepage is the chef who eats instant noodles at home. Another commenter derailed the thread with “Am I pretty?? (story),” because of course they did. Underneath the memes, the real split emerges: team “save bytes and ship it” vs. team “precision forever.” Either way, the internet agrees on one thing: debates about color get spicy—fast.
Key Points
- •The author built a minifier test suite while developing csskit’s minifier and notes csskit currently has a low pass rate with notable failures.
- •They argue that OKLab/OKLCH color values rarely need more than 3 decimal places; extra precision wastes bytes without perceptible benefit.
- •For CIE Lab/LCH, one decimal place is sufficient, while sRGB notations like rgb() and hsl(), and degree units, can use zero decimal places.
- •Perceptual difference metrics (CIE2000/dE00 and dEOk) and their JND thresholds (≈2.0 for dE00; 0.02 for dEOk) are used to justify safe rounding.
- •Rounding at these levels remains acceptable even when using color-mix() or relative color syntax, with edge cases deemed negligible.