I love the gradient palettes...
it looks real good with 8 steps and over...
I've been doing some thinking...
NAMED COLORS
The color names are more useful than the colors themselves... I mean that they offer a better memorization system. Those names get remembered more easily, that's why i keep them... and probably out of habit... Later on, on the process of refining a web page design, those named colors may be replaced by subtler shades and non-named colors but the names prove handy for quick reference... So on that plane, the palette is used rather as a memorization device to help remember and learn the names, making it possible to gradually type the names without consulting the palette...
I do not think that those colors are meant to be sorted in their alphabetical names order. (too scattered as you said). On that level they are just names with no valuable link to the color's hue progression. I've attached two sorted colors palettes, one from the wikipedia page ( thanks, this was a useful ref.) and the other is my own sorting (from uWebCol unit) as i've been using in the HTMLEditor. If you open the palette file you will see that i've apposed to each rgb color line the color's name, which could give an idea of how to retrieve it later for providing the selected colors information...
SAFE COLORS
I should not confuse safe colors with named colors. I understand that they are two different systems. So the palette should probably be named accordingly?
THTMLColorPalette?
Maybe the TColorPalette should remain simple and serve as a base component for a HTMLColorPalette? Since NamedColors are not new colors, only a semantic layer added to the assigned color... This way, access to colors' names and/or HexValues would be separated and (eventually, for named colors) easily accessible for localization although i haven't heard that they were translated yet...
TColorPalette as a base component could also be accompanied by a PaletteMaker to produce custom palettes. It could offer a RGB editor, drag and drop fonctionalities between 2 palettes (the referenced one and one on the making), aPalette manager where could be moved ranges from one palette to the other... Custom palettes could be used as Themes...