Help:Color

Color on computer screens is made up of 3 "primary" colors: red, green and blue. You will often see this referred to as "RGB." These colors are "additive": zero of all three gives black, while maximum of all three makes white.

Colors by number
Computers work with powers of two. The relevant vocabulary for describing colors uses "hexadecimal", which is base sixteen. Hexadecimal numbers are how geeks count up to 15 without using more than one digit. In hexadecimal, 0-15 is counted 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F.


 * Using one hex digit for each of the three base colors, the range for each is 0 to 15 (16 or 24 possibilities), for a total of 163, or 4,096 possible values.
 * Using two hex digits for each color, the range for each is 0 to 255 (256 or 28 possibilities). This yields a total of 2563, or 16,777,216 values; Each base color (red, green, and blue) can have a value in one of these ranges.

In HTML, hexadecimal color codes are preceded by "#". Then:


 * Using the 0-15 method, a RGB color is represented as #000 for black, through #FFF for white.


 * In the 0-255 method, black is #000000 and white is #FFFFFF.

Note that equal amounts of red, green and blue produce various shades of gray (for example #A2A2A2). Pure reds are of the form #XX0000, (where X is one of the valid hexidecimal digits 0-F), pure greens are #00XX00, and pure blue shades are #0000XX. Any color combination can be created using any number from 00 to FF in each of the three positions.

Colors by name
As with many tricks and tools on computers, copying something you like is often the quickest way to get there. There are also palettes of named colors.

If you're really lazy then a list of color templates can be found here.

There is another palette of named colors which might or might not work with various web browsers.

Color picker
There are plenty of hex color pickers online.
 * W3school's HTML color picker
 * Color picker

Text color coding
Using CSS color attribute:


 * red writing
 * red writing


 * green writing
 * green writing


 * blue writing
 * blue writing

This has the advantage that other attributes can be included in the same "span" tag.

Obsolete
The use of the  HTML tags can still be used but deprecated. It is not recommended to use  as the feature can be removed at any time.


 * RED TEXT
 * RED TEXT


 * GREEN TEXT
 * GREEN TEXT


 * BLUE TEXT
 * BLUE TEXT

Other use of colors
Colors can also be defined in other html tags, such as table tags. BGCOLOR="#abcxyz" will set the background color of a table, row, or cell when used inside the appropriate tag. Wiki table colors can also be defined using the "style" attribute.

Accessibility
Please be aware that some readers with poor eyesight cannot read text with a low color contrast. It is recommended to use a tool such as Are my colors accessible? to check whether people can actually read the text.

This text is hard to read isn't it. Imagine if you had you read all the articles like this. It wouldn't be fun at all.

This text is much better to read. You can easily see the words.