HTML Colors

Colors are very important to give a good look and feel to your website. You can specify colors on page level using tag or you can set colors for individual tags.

The tag has following attributes which can be used to set different colors:

• bgcolor: Sets a color for the background of the page.

• text: Sets a color for the body text.

• alink: Sets a color for active links or selected links.

• link: Sets a color for linked text.

• vlink: Sets a color for visited links - that is, for linked text that you have already clicked on.

NOTE: It is recommended to use CSS to set background or text colors.

HTML Color Coding Methods:

There are following three different methods to set colors in your web page:

• Color names: You can specify color names directly like green, blue or red.

• Hex codes: A six-digit code representing the amount of red, green, and blue that make up the color.

• Color decimal or percentage values: : This value is specified using the rgb( ) property.

Now we will see these coloring schemes one by one.

HTML Colors - Color Names:

You can sepecify direct a color name to set text or background color. W3C has listed 16 basic color names that will validate with an HTML validator but there are over 200 different color names supported by Netscape and IE.

ere is the list of W3C Standard 16 Colors names and it is recommended to use them.

HTML Colors - Hex Codes:

A hexadecimal is a 6 digit representation of a color. The first two digits(RR) represent a red value, the next two are a green value(GG), and the last are the blue value(BB).

A hexadecimal value can be taken from any graphics software like Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paintshop Pro or even using Advanced Paint Brush.

Each hexadecimal code will be preceded by a pound or hash sign #. Following are the examples to use Hexadecimal notation.

HTML Colors - RGB Values:

This color value is specified using the rgb( ) property. This property takes three values, one each for red, green, and blue. The value can be an integer between 0 and 255 or a percentage.

NOTE: All the browsers does not support rgb() property of color so it is recommended not to use it.

Following is the example to show few colors using RGB values.

Here is the list of 216 colors which are supposed to be most safe and computer independent colors. These colors very from hexa code 000000 to FFFFFF. These color are safe to use because they ensure that all computers would display the colors correctly when running a 256 color palette: