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Now let me introduce you to the basics of color also known as colour. Why you ask because most web designers want to know how to add color to their web page or their entire site. Now in HTML and XHTML you have two options for displaying color, which include named colors and hexadecimal codes. And in CSS, you have five options for displaying color, which include the named colors, along with the hexadecimal codes or you can use the functional RGB notation, which consists of two color value types, which are made up of a triplet of integers that are called percentage notation and integer-triplet notation. And last but not least, you can use the shorthand notation method, which was designed for CSS only. You should realize though that not every color can be represented by the shorthand notation method, I know it sucks.

For the people that need to know the equivalents of the RGB color values to the hexadecimal color values I will display a chart for you to see the equivalents. But first let me explain on how you can get the equivalent for each value. Now in order to get the percentage values you will need to divide a triplet-integer notation number, which can range from 0-255 by 255, for example, 215/255 = 0.8431372….. now move the decimal point 2 places to the right, which gives us the percentage value 84.3%, which I rounded down to the nearest tenth. Now when using real numbers, which is the best way to display color, you should be aware that most browsers will ignore the decimal point and will round the value to the nearest number also known as an integer, for example, 84.3% will be rounded to 84%.

Web safe colors also known as the web safe color palette, browser-safe colors, browser-safe palette, Netscape palette, 216 palette, web palette, color map, and the 6×6×6 color cube, all these names describe the same set of colors. The web safe colors are the colors that should not dither on any computer display systems that can only display 256 colors also known as 8-bit color, and will display the same on both Macintosh (MAC) and (PC) computers. Now to complicate things even more, browsers in order to run quicker, will only show a specific set of 256 colors on 8-bit color monitors. And if that browser has to show a color that’s out of its range, the browser will only have two choices, the first choice is that the browser can either mix two colors to create the missing color, which is also known as dithering. And the second choice is that the browser can also find the closest matching color within the specific set of the 256 colors, which can be a close match or a way off the mark match that we should not speak of ever.

Now there are also 22 really web safe colors that have been discovered from the 216 web-safe colors that are reliably displayed on Windows (PC), Macintosh (MAC), Internet Explorer (IE), Netscape Navigator, 8-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit display systems.

Color names also known as color keywords, named colors and named color keywords in which their is 147 color names that are defined in the CSS3 color specification. Now the 147 color names also include the 17 standard color names. All 147 color names where taken from the X Windows Systems, X color names, which has been in use for many and I mean many years. So the 147 color names even though they are not the standard are likely to be very well supported.