Colors are displayed combining  RED, GREEN, and BLUE light sources.

Color Values

Colors are defined using a hexadecimal notation for the combination of Red, Green, and Blue color values (RGB). The lowest value that can be given to one light source is 0 (hex #00). The highest value is 255 (hex #FF).

This table shows the result of combining Red, Green, and Blue light sources:.

Color Names

A collection of color names are supported by newer versions of both Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Note: Only 16 color names are supported by the W3C HTML 4.0 standard (aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow). For all other colors you should use the Color HEX value.

Web Safe Colors

A few years ago, when most computers supported only 256 different colors, a list of 216 Web Safe Colors was suggested as a Web standard. The reason for this was that Microsoft and Mac operating system used 40 different "reserved" fixed system colors (about 20 each).

We are not sure how important this is now, since more and more computers are equipped with the ability to display millions of different colors, but the choice is left to you.

216 Cross Platform Colors

This 216 cross platform web safe color palette was originally created to ensure that all computers would display all colors correctly when running a 256 color palette.