A very important element in webpage design is color. You can customize the colors of
your page to fit a theme or to make your page more "personalized." Everything from the
background color to the color of your hyperlinks can be changed.
HTML uses a special system to specify colors. It is commonly called a "hexidecimal
triplet" and looks like this:
#rrggbb
The "rr" is the amount of red in the color and it ranges from 00 to ff, with 00 being no red in
the color and ff being a lot of red. "gg" is the amount of green in the color and "bb" is the
amount of blue. Think all this "amount" business doesn't make any sense? Well, to put it
simply, almost any color of which you can conceive is made up of different amounts of
red, green, and blue. For example, the color purple has almost equal parts of red and blue,
with no green; on the other hand, yellow has equal parts red and green, but no blue. It is
almost like the color wheel in art, except that in the world of computers, the primary colors are red, green, and blue; simply mix
any of the three colors and you get another color.
Because there are thousands of combinations of red, green, and blue, there are thousands
of colors you can make. Try experimenting. Remember that the numbers go from 0 to f (0,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f).
Below is a sample list of colors taken from Netscape's wealth of HTML resources:
| White | ffffff | |
| Red | ff0000 | |
| Green | 00ff00 | |
| Blue | 0000ff | |
| Magenta | ff00ff | |
| Cyan | 00ffff | |
| Yellow | ffff00 | |
| Black | 000000 | |
| Aquamarine | 70db93 | |
| Baker's Chocolate | 5c3317 | |
| Blue Violet | 9f5f9f | |
| Brass | b5a642 | |
| Bright Gold | d9d919 | |
| Brown | a62a2a | |
| Bronze | 8c7853 | |
| Bronze II | a67d3d | |
| Cadet Blue | 5f9f9f | |
| Cool Copper | d98719 | |
| Copper | b87333 | |
| Coral | ff7f00 | |
| Corn Flower Blue | 42426f | |
| Dark Brown | 5c4033 | |
| Dark Green | 2f4f2f | |
| Dark Green Copper | 4a766e | |
| Dark Olive Green | 4f4f2f | |
| Dark Orchid | 9932cd | |
| Dark Purple | 871f78 | |
| Dark Slate Blue | 6b238e | |
| Dark Slate Grey | 2f4f4f | |
| Dark Tan | 97694f | |
| Dark Turquoise | 7093db | |
| Quartz | d9d9f3 | |
| Rich Blue | 5959ab | |
| Salmon | 6f4242 | |
| Scarlet | 8c1717 | |
| Sea Green | 238e68 | |
| Semi-Sweet Chocolate | 6b4226 | |
| Sienna | 8e6b23 | |
| Silver | e6e8fa | |
| Sky Blue | 3299cc | |
| Slate Blue | 007fff | |
| Spicy Pink | ff1cae | |
| Spring Green | 00ff7f | |
| Steel Blue | 236b8e | |
| Summer Sky | 38b0de | |
| Tan | db9370 | |
| Thistle | d8bfd8 | |
| Very Dark Brown | 5c4033 | |
| Very Light Grey | cdcdcd | |
| Violet | 4f2f4f | |
| Violet Red | cc3299 | |
| Wheat | d8d8bf | |
| Yellow Green | 99cc32 | |