If you were writing an application where you wanted to allow your user to choose colours - say for tagging items or customising an interface - it might make sense to present them with a list of named colours rather than make them choose from a colour wheel (or, heaven forfend, directly enter a 24 bit RGB number).<p>It would likely be best to define your own list of named colours, for localisation reasons if nothing else, but for the initial version of a feature I could see using the CSS colour names directly.