Web Page Colours

• The English way of spelling is colour and the American way is color. When we are writing software, we always use color, otherwise our code won’t work (or will be thrown out by our compiler). As I am English, I shall write colour this way in all my ramblings.
• Also the English way of spelling is grey (eg: Earl Grey) and the American way is usually gray (eg: American Gray Birch). When we are writing software, we should always use gray, otherwise our code won’t be reliable (as it happens Firefox and IE will render both spellings correctly). Microsoft .Net always uses gray, so it must be used or will be thrown out by our compiler.

Web Standard Colour Names

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has listed 16 valid colour names for HTML and CSS. This is a limited definition and others exist, however if you want valid HTML or CSS use the HEX values instead. These 16 colours are:

Colours defined as HEX values

Colours can be defined as hexadecimal notation as a ‘hex triplet’. This is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML and CSS to represent colours. The bytes represent the RGB (red, green and blue) components of the colour. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the colour components. The hex triplet is formed by concatenating the three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the order RGB. Therefore the 3 primary colours are represented as:
#FF0000 = Red    #00FF00 = Green    #0000FF = Blue
#000000 = Black    #FFFFFF = White

Colours sorted by HEX Value

The list below is a complete list of the colour names supported by all major browsers, it also matches all the available colour names in the System.Drawing.Color structure.

(If you can’t find your colour above, another great website is:
RGB to Color Name Mapping)