« HTML Colours »

When choosing and using colours for yours pages, try not to be too critical!

You may well have heard the term WYSIWYG (Whizzy WIG) - "What You See Is What You Get" - it was the in-word when DTP was born.  Well no, what you got, when printed was an approximation of what you saw.  Giving the go ahead for an unchecked manuscript or brochure almost guaranteed an expensive re-run as even a fractional difference caused by kerning differences (the gap between letter pairs) meant that your pagination goes to pot as the document length increases.

So, differences can you expect and what causes them?

Differences between video cards can be amazing.  For example, colours from the Matrox Millenium appear brighter, cleaner and more vibrant than the ATI Rage Pro (which favours video accelerator more).  Some manufacturers, notably Matrox, add support for individual models of monitor.

The version of the drivers for the video card can be a contributing factor.  I tend to download updates as they happen as they generally mean faster screen redraws, new features, bug fixes for the version I got last month...

The size and quality of the monitor.  Some, such as the high end Mitsubishi 2045u are colour calibrated, but the person viewing your site is far more likely to be using some old unbranded VGA screen, or cheap import of dubious birth.  Which ties to the next point, colour temperature.  This dictates the colours you get, some monitors can get changed by 0.1 degree at a time, lesser models will have a hot or cold spots where you have blue or red tinges.  Then there's the gun failure where the picture gets a green tinge three days after the warranty runs out.

Finally, external factors come into play.  Acknowledging the large number of people with varying degrees of colour blindness, the temperature of the room lights, presence of televisions (and other moving colours) and streaming sunlight all makes a difference to how you percieve the colours...

In the end result, unless you have specific reason, go with the colours you're happy with in the knowledge that at least some folk will see the same shades.

The above uses 'font color=name' but an alternative is to use
<font color="#rrbbgg"> giving you access to a full pallete.

:- <font color="#cc33ff"> was used for the above.

Note:
This method, while still valid, is technically obsolete and the programming for HTML is now XHTML, which is backwards compatible.
Really you should be using CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. When I get a minutes I'll write a tutorial for it.



NHUE colour palette     NVALUE colour palette

You can actually enter any value or word you want - even your own name - and still get a colour output, but what everyone else may get is another matter entirely!!!

The sixteen colours above are the browser safe ones and short of an ancient monoscreen screen, will work with any browsers. The same is generally true for the 216 named coloured below.*

Source for following colours:*
HTML Programmers Reference by Thomas Powell & Dan Whitworth
[Osbourne Publications ISBN 0-07-882559-8]

*Except "Ackadia" naturally, which will throw up a validation error in HTML checkers (like CSE HMTL Validator which I thoroughly recommend.) It does however show that you can mess up and still get a result, although most browsers will look askew at it.