What is the recommended interface for color manipulation?

[BALLABIO GERARDO <GERARDO BALLABIO ESTERNI GRUPPO MPS IT>]

Hi all,
I'd like to ask you a question.

I want to convert a string (e.g., "white", "blue", "#ff0000") to a color. I found in the gtkmm documentation that there's a class Gdk::Color with a constructor taking a Glib::ustring as argument. I tried it and it does what I want. However I also read that using Gdk for drawing is now deprecated and Cairo should be used instead. Is Gdk::Color deprecated too? If so, what should I use? I could not find a corresponding class or function in Cairomm.

Thank you.
 Gerardo