HTML color swatches from spectral data?

Hello all,

I have an idea for a web application that I thought I'd post here and
see if you color gurus had any input. This is just an idea at this
point.

The background: The area of interest is in the colors that metal halide
light bulbs (lamps), which are used to grow corals and clams. People
are interested in color for two reasons. The first is the visual
appearance to people looking at the tank. The second is that the color
of light coming at the corals can actually cause the corals to change
colors, as they will show different pigments in response to different
light stimuli.

I've just written an application that compares lamp color by plotting
the lamps against the 1976 CIE color chart, (with some help from people
in this group), which came out pretty nice. If anyone is interested in
seeing it, I'd be glad to email the URL (it hasn't been publicly
launched yet).

Ok, back to the new idea... I realized that RGB values can be
calculated from the data I have access to (irradiance at 2nm from 380
to 800 or so). So, I was thinking it would be a fairly easy thing to
show color swatches of different lamps on a webpage, for comparison.
So, the user would see a yellow-white swatch next to one brand of lamp,
and a blue-white swatch next to another, and so on.

I'll need to dig around for a conversion routine... I've already
converted to xyY, XYZ, u' and v'. My understanding is that RGB is not
an absolute color space, so does this mean I need to use sRGB or Adobe
1998 RGB?

In reading about color gamuts, I find one thing funny... I found
webpages with CIE charts comparing the gamuts of sRGB and Adobe... now
what about the colors outside the gamut? How can the colors even
appear on my monitor (on the chart) if they're outside the gamut of my
monitor's color displaying abilities??? Does this mean that those
colors are off as I see them on my monitor?

Another limitation is HTML's 16 million colors... and of course monitor
calibration and graphics modes would affect the end user...

Maybe I'm overthinking the color matching issue, that's what I'm trying
to figure out at this point.

This webpage would be used by hobbyists who are in the market for bulbs
as a quick reference, so the color matching requirements are probably
less stringent than the projects that others in this group are
interested in, but naturally, the more accurate, the better.

I'm just trying to get an idea of how viable this is, and any feedback
that anyone might have.


Thanks in advance

.

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