&gt;The colors they call “red”, “green”, “blue”, etc. are nowhere near the colors humans would consider closest to matching those labels, and combinations of basic CSS colors result in unusably ugly design.<p>Is there even a standard for what people would say represents a given color?  Color perception may very well have a cultural component to it.  I know the perception of sound does have a cultural component because there are certain distinct sounds that, if not exposed to while really young, are effectively simplified into a single sound by the brain.  The common example is the r and l sound among Japanese, but there is far more.