[hnlmorg]

As touched on in the article, the beauty of colour names would be that they’re celebrated for the machine.

#124356 might look different on one monitor or workstation compared to another.

Having colour names which are calibrated for the device makes a lot of sense. Assuming those colour names are actually calibrated, which as the article also mentions, so often wasn’t the case.

As an aside, this is a big problem in DTP where your display should match the page. However you obviously wouldn’t use colour names in that specific industry because you’re dealing with a vastly greater range of colours and shades.

[account42]

CSS named colors are just aliases for specific RGB values. They are not any more calibrated than using those RGB values directly.

[hnlmorg]

In the case of CSS specifically, that’s right. But the practice of assigning names to colour values predate CSS by quite some time. And the reasons for doing so are what I’ve described.

[robinsonb5]

Nitpick: you absolutely would use colour names in that industry - it's just that the colour names would be more along the lines of "Pantone 137C" than "Yellow".

[mikestaas]

In desktop publishing or other graphic arts where you are sending your files to pre-press for physical printing you would use CMYK or Pantone (for spot colours) + paper grade.