Appendix G. Color Names and Values
With the popular browsers, and according to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard, you may prescribe the display color for various elements in your documents. You do so by specifying a color value or a standard name. The user may override these color specifications through her browser preferences.
Color Values
In all cases, you may set the color value
for an HTML element, such as <body> text,
<table> background, and so on, as a
six-digit hexadecimal number that represents the red, green, and blue
(RGB) components of the color. The first two digits correspond to the
red component of the color, the next two are the green component, and
the last two are the blue component. A value of 00 corresponds to a
component being completely off; the hexadecimal value of FF (decimal
255) corresponds to the component being completely on. Thus, bright
red is FF0000, bright green is 00FF00, and bright blue is 0000FF.
Other primary colors are mixtures of the components, such as yellow
(FFFF00), magenta (FF00FF), and cyan (00FFFF). White (FFFFFF) and
black (000000) also are easy to figure out.
You use these values in a tag by replacing the color with the RGB
triple, preceded by a pound sign (#). Thus, to
make all visited links display as magenta, use this body tag:
<body vlink="#FF00FF">
Get HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
