There are several ways to specify color in HTML. The easiest is by color name. The most common is by hexadecimal number.
| Black | Silver | Gray | White |
| Maroon | Red | Purple | Fuchsia |
| Green | Lime | Olive | Yellow |
| Navy | Blue | Teal | Aqua |
Obviously, 16 colors make a very limited palette and, if you want to greatly expand it, you'll quickly run out of color names. ("Sort of gray with a little greenish yellow" doesn't cut it when you're writing code.)
To expand the available pallette, colors are specified using hexadecimal numbers.
The hexadecimal system for specifying colors is widely used in computer programing. Hexadecimal numbers are a base-16 number system which means the "numbers" are:
To design Web pages, you don't really need to have a full understanding of this. To write computer programs, you do. At this point, all you need to remember is that 0 is minimum and f is maximum.
There are several ways to mix primary colors to create other colors.
When mixing paint, we're used to combining various amounts of red, yellow and blue to create other colors.
Designers who work in print are used to thinking in terms of CMYK - cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.
Color photographers think of color as either additive (red/green/blue) or subtractive (yellow/magenta/cyan) depending on what they're doing.
Computer programmers and Web designers think of color as various amounts of Red, Green and Blue.
To specify color in computer code, you are using the additive system so you specify the amount of red, green and blue using hexadecimal code.
| Red | Green | Blue |
The color red specified with hex code:
| # | ff | 00 | 00 |
The color yellow specified with hex code:
| # | ff | ff | 00 |
The color blue specified with hex code: #0000ff (no red + no green + max blue)
The color cyan specified with hex code: #00ffff (no red + max green + max blue)
The color white [white] specified with hex code: #ffffff (max red + max green + max blue)
The color black specified with hex code: #000000 (no red + no green + no blue)
The color gray specified with hex code: #666666 (med red + med green + med blue)
Hex colors are always preceded by: # (called the "pound sign," "number sign," "hash tag" or "octothorpe")