[mpetroff]

This would be true if the CSS color names were actually reasonable, but many of them are not.

One would be better off using the results [1] of Heer & Stone (2012) [2] (or a similar analysis) to assign names to sRGB colors. You end up with 33 unique names instead of more than 100, and the number of unique names can be reduced further by merging synonyms.

[1] http://vis.stanford.edu/color-names/analyzer/ [2] https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208547

[jedberg]

It doesn't matter what the names are, the point is you can have a plugin that changes one color to another based on their names and what you can see. The names are a much smaller search space than "all possible hex codes".

[mpetroff]

I'd argue that the 147 named CSS colors are still too many (but definitely better than the ~16.8 million sRGB colors). Regardless, since hex codes are used in practice, they would still need to be dealt with.