Now there are quite a few advantages to an online business vs a brick and mortar business; like we don't commute, well maybe a 30 second one own hallway, we don't pay building rent, we don't have employees, while except maybe virtual ones.

But, one advantage that's quite unique online is that we can sorta "spy" on our competitors a bit more easily.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating any wrong doing here or anything UNethical or anything like that, and I'm certainly NOT saying to "steal text"(plagiarize) or anything like that.

All this is, is a simple little method that's quite common to see how our competitors do things,... ability to be able to look "into" their websites. In Search Engine Optimization field, it's often done to see how and where others place their keywords, their tags, descriptions, etc. etc..

I'm simply talking of viewing HTML code that makes up webpages,... now anyone can do this, if they are somewhat familiar with their web browser. And it basically works same for both browsers; IE and Netscape.

Hexadecimal Color Notation on Web

By Stephen Bucaro

When designing elements for your webpage, you will often be called upon to specify a color. For example, code for a span shown below specifies that color of text within span will be yellow.

<span style="color:yellow;">Text</span>

Colors can be specified according to their names, for example "yellow", "green", or "blue". In many cases, these simple color names will work. But what if you want to specify a more sophisticated color like "cornflowerblue"? A particular browser may not recognize a particular color name. It's more reliable to specify colors with an "RGB triplet".

An RGB triplet specifies a color based upon amounts of red, green, and blue, on a scale from 0 to 255, required to create color. For example, to create color cornflowerblue you need red=100, green=149, and blue=237. We could then specify color of text within a span using rgb function as shown below.

<span style="color:rgb(100,149,237);">Text</span>

This will work fine with style notation, but what if you want to use straight html. Html doesn't recognize rgb function. In that case, you can specify color using "hexadecimal" notation. Whereas decimal numbering system uses characters 0 through 9 to get 10 values, hexadecimal numbering system uses characters 0 through f to get 16 values. (After 9 characters a, b, c, d, e and f are used, as shown below.)

Decimal Hexidecimal Equivilants

dec hex 0 = 0 1 = 1 2 = 2 3 = 3 4 = 4 5 = 5 6 = 6 7 = 7 8 = 8 9 = 9 10 = A 11 = B 12 = C 13 = D 14 = E 15 = F