Web Colours

Web colors are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web, and the methods for describing and specifying those colors. Colors may be specified as an RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format (a ''hex triplet'') or according to their common English names in some cases. A color tool or other graphics software is often used to generate color values. In some uses, hexadecimal color codes are specified with notation using a leading number sign (#). A color is specified according to the intensity of its red, green and blue components, each represented by eight bits. Thus, there are 24 bits used to specify a web color within the sRGB gamut, and 16,777,216 colors that may be so specified.

Colors outside the sRGB gamut can be specified in Cascading Style Sheets by making one or more of the red, green and blue components negative or greater than 100%, so the color space is theoretically an unbounded extrapolation of sRGB similar to scRGB. Specifying a non-sRGB color this way requires the RGB() function call. It is impossible with the hexadecimal syntax (and thus impossible in legacy HTML documents that do not use CSS).

The first versions of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator used the X11 color names as the basis for their color lists, as both started as X Window System applications.
Web colors have an unambiguous colorimetric definition, sRGB, which relates the chromaticities of a particular phosphor set, a given transfer curve, adaptive whitepoint, and viewing conditions. These have been chosen to be similar to many real-world monitors and viewing conditions, to allow rendering to be fairly close to the specified values even without color management. User agents vary in the fidelity with which they represent the specified colors. More advanced user agents use color management to provide better color fidelity; this is particularly important for Web-to-print applications.

Hex triplet

A hex triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications to represent colors. The bytes represent the red, green, and blue components of the color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the color components. Thus web colors specify colors in the 24-bit RGB color scheme. The hex triplet is formed by concatenating three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the following order:
*Byte 1: red value (color type red)
*Byte 2: green value (color type green)
*Byte 3: blue value (color type blue)
For example, consider the color where the red/green/blue values are decimal numbers: red=36, green=104, blue=160 (a grayish-blue color). The decimal numbers 36, 104, and 160 are equivalent to the hexadecimal numbers 24, 68, and A0 respectively. The hex triplet is obtained by concatenating the six hexadecimal digits together, 2468A0 in this example.

If any one of the three color values is less than 10 hex (16 decimal), it must be represented with a leading zero so that the triplet always has exactly six digits. For example, the decimal triplet 4, 8, 16 would be represented by the hex digits 04, 08, 10, forming the hex triplet 040810.

The number of colors that can be represented by this system is 16⁶ or 256³ or 2²⁴ = 16,777,216.

Shorthand hexadecimal form

An abbreviated, three (hexadecimal)-digit form is used. Expanding this form to the six-digit form is as simple as repeating each digit: 09C becomes 0099CC as presented on the following CSS example:

.threedigit
.sixdigit /* same color as above */

This shorthand form reduces the palette to 4,096 colors, equivalent of 12-bit color as opposed to 24-bit color using the whole six-digit form (16,777,216 colors). This limitation is sufficient for many text-based documents.

Converting RGB to hexadecimal

RGB values are usually given in the 0–255 range; if they are in the 0–1 range, the values are multiplied by 255 before conversion. This number divided by sixteen (integer division; ignoring any remainder) gives the first hexadecimal digit (between 0 and F, where the letters A to F represent the numbers 10 to 15. See hexadecimal for more details). The remainder gives the second hexadecimal digit. For instance, the RGB value 201 divides into 12 groups of 16, thus the first digit is C. A remainder of nine gives the hexadecimal number C9. This process is repeated for each of the three color values.

Conversion between number bases is a common feature of calculators, including both hand-held models and the software calculators bundled with most modern operating systems. Web-based tools specifically for converting color values are also available.

HTML color names

Recent W3C specifications of color names distinguishes between ''basic'' and ''extended'' colors. In HTML and XHTML, colors can be used for text, background color, frame borders, tables, and individual table cells.

Basic colors

The basic colors are 16 colors defined in the HTML 4.01 specification, ratified in 1999, as follows (names are defined in this context to be case-insensitive):

These 16 were labelled as sRGB and included in the HTML 3.0 specification, which noted they were "the standard 16 colors supported with the Windows VGA palette."

Extended colors

Extended colors are the result of merging specifications from HTML 4.01, CSS 2.0, SVG 1.0 and CSS3 User Interfaces (CSS3 UI).

Several colors are defined by web browsers. A particular browser may not recognize all of these colors, but as of 2005, all modern, general-use, graphical browsers support the full list of colors. Many of these colors are from the list of X11 color names distributed with the X Window System. These colors were standardized by SVG 1.0, and are accepted by SVG Full user agents. They are not part of SVG Tiny.

The list of colors shipped with the X11 product varies between implementations and clashes with certain of the HTML names such as green. X11 colors are defined as simple RGB (hence, no particular color space), rather than sRGB. This means that the list of colors found in X11 (e.g., in /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt) should not directly be used to choose colors for the web.

The list of web "X11 colors" from the CSS3 specification, along with their hexadecimal and decimal equivalents, is shown below. Compare the alphabetical lists in the W3C standards. This includes the common synonyms: aqua (HTML4/CSS 1.0 standard name) and cyan (common sRGB name), magenta (common sRGB name) and fuchsia (HTML4/CSS 1.0 standard name), gray (HTML4/CSS 1.0 standard name) and grey.

CSS colors

The Cascading Style Sheets