An essential reference for fast loading HTML pages.

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WeGo.ca Website Developers

Natures Primary Colour System, RGB, is all around us in the form of light. Even at the back of our eyes are millions of light receptors, most of which detect either Red, Green or Blue light. The Secondary Colour System is CMY (Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) most commonly known for it's use in the Printing processes where pigments are deposited on a light reflecting / absorbing substrate of some kind (usually paper).

Because our Internet pages are viewed via RGB Monitors or Television sets, RGB is the colour system that we are concerned with when creating Internet (Web) pages.

When colour controls were included in Internet HTML references, a base of 16 colours was chosen to match the 16 VGA video colours used in the popular DOS (and MS Windows) computers. Perhaps surprisingly there are still many VGA computers used in corporate offices and homes around the world.

Also still very common are computers that display a maximum number of 256 colours. When Netscape considered the parsing of HTML colour definitions for their browsers, they decided on 216 colours that would not Dither when displayed via 256 colour video boards on most Browsers and computer platforms. Also included were Pure colours and greys etc.shown below.

The most common method of including a colour reference in HTML is by defining colours as Hexadecimal values.

When using colours other than those listed, realise that many people will either see dithered colours or another (nearest) colour which may even be a grey! Also some Browsers do not support Table/Cell backgrounds.

The accompanying chart colours are described in Hexadecimal notation.

To read these colours as RGB values, then:
| FF = 255 | CC = 204 | 99 = 153 |
| 66 = 102 | 33 = 51 | 00 = 0 |

Click a colour chip on the left to view the chart colours against any selected background.