> almost all the time, the display is sRGB, so that’s your gamut;
This is becoming less and less of a safe statement. On the one hand "yay HDR"!
On the other hand, we're in for many years of weird bugs. For example recently I've been working on an app that I want to look good in HDR and I tried to share screenshots. Everything looked good to me. People on the other side were complaining about weird colors. Several hours of investigation later I realized that Windows was switching color spaces in my screenshots. Pressing the print screen button gave me a subtly different result than what I was actually seeing and of course I didn't spot it when emailing off the screen shots.
Yes, it’s exactly that, because:
- almost all the time, the display is sRGB, so that’s your gamut;
- almost all the time, you want to do your lighting and compositing in a linear space.
- and sometimes your channels are normals or something, not colors at all, as others have noted.
So it’s linear in the sRGB 0..255 gamut.
It is a bit of a shame that most easy-to-use tools and workflows are limited to sRGB, so it’s really fiddly to support HDR displays and print.