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below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and byline, copyright, and resource box below is included. ----------------------------------------------------------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
On first appearance, this looks pretty simple but you need two hexadecimal characters to represent all decimal values from 0 to 255. When you increment decimal 9 by 1, you change 9 to 0 and put 1 in ten's place. When you increment hexidecimal F by one, you change F to 0 and put 1 in "sixteens" place. Sometimes it's not easy to convert between decimal and hexadecimal in your head.
