Specifying Colors by Name

Colors can also be identified by one of 140 color names originally developed for the X Window System. The complete list appears in Table 16-2 (sorted alphabetically, with numerical values included) and Table 16-3 (grouped by hue). You can also view samples of each color at http://www.learningwebdesign.com/colornames.html.

To set the background color to a dark olive green using a color name, the complete HTML tag would look like this: 

<BODY BGCOLOR="darkolivegreen">

Grays

There are also one hundred variants of gray numbered 1 through 100. “Gray1” is the darkest; “gray100” is the lightest. The color we generally think of as “gray” is roughly equivalent to “gray75.” Both spellings “gray” and “grey” are acceptable.

Color Name Cautions

There are several pitfalls to using color names instead of numerical color values:

Browser support

Color names are supported only by Navigator Versions 2.0 and higher and Internet Explorer Versions 3.0 and higher. Internet Explorer 2.0 supports the following 16 color names:

aqua

gray

navy

silver

black

green

olive

teal

blue

lime

purple

white

fuchsia

maroon

red

yellow

These are also the only color names specified by the W3C in the HTML 4.01 Specification.

Color shifting

Of the 140 color names, only 10 represent nondithering colors from the web palette. They are aqua, black, blue, cyan, fuchsia, lime, magenta, red, white, and yellow.

When viewed on an 8-bit display, the remaining ...

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