This site is the result of a little bit of light-hearted experimentation. For those people who
have been designing web pages for a while, there was a day not too long ago when it was not
possible to change the background color or set different colors for different types of text. But
now we have this luxury. But the html tags necessary to set these colors are still fairly cryptic.
Why will bgcolor="#4566C9" give you a shade of blue?
Well, these numbers are the hexadecimal equivalent of the RGB values for that color. A mouthful!
Almost any graphics program as well as some stand alone programs will give you the RGB value of a
color. This will be three numbers between 0 and 255. But these numbers are in the base-10 number
system, the one we use every day. Well, the computer doesn't work in this number system. You may
have heard of the binary system which is based on 0's and 1's. This is a base-2 number system meaning
it has only 2 "numbers."
But your browser will recognize neither binary nor base-10 numbers for the color settings, instead
it requires a third number system, base-16. Base-16 is another name for the hexadecimal numbers.
Hexadecimal numbers go from 0 to F.
In the hexadecimal system, you count as follows:
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F,10,11,12,13,14.... and so on.
The letters A through F are used (by convention) to represent the additional "numbers" needed for
a base-16 number system. As you may remember from grade school days, in base-10 the number 56
has a 5 in the tens place and 6 in the ones giving you a number with the value (5 * 10) + (6 * 1) = 56.
With the base-16 system, the number 56 represents a different value with the 5 being in the "sixteens"
place and 6 being in the ones place giving you a number with the value (5 * 16) + (6 * 1) = 86. The
base-16 number FF would give you a value of 255 [ (15 * 16) + (15 * 1) = 255 ]
There are ways to convert Base-10 numbers to Base-16 numbers by hand, but an easier way is to use a
fairly advanced calculator which converts decimals (base-10 numbers) to base-16 numbers. This is a
key that is often labeled "HEX."
Easier still is to take a look at the colors we have provided and use the hexadecimal numbers provided
for those colors.
My friends and I have taken great liberties with these colors. There are a million and one names out
there for a million and one colors. We just decided to make up our own. Whatever you call them, use
them if you'd like and help us name some others!
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