Colour

Explanation

Years ago we had only a small choice of colours for websites. We were told to limit ourselves to the 216 websafe colours. It was about cross-platform and cross-browser inconsistencies—you don’t want to know the horrid details.

Now you can select any colour from a vast range and assign it to the text or background of any part of your webpage. Use code of the form color: #5a8ca0 ; or color: rgb(90,140,60) ; or background: #5a8ca0 ; on the style sheet. You’ll find full details and clear explanations on the W3C website.²

Observations

• The H, L and S sliders in the illustration are imperfect. I don’t think it’s possible to program them to correspond exactly to the perceptual qualities of hue, luminance and saturation.
• The colour codes in the illustration may be useful elsewhere. For example, the #5a8ca0 form is an efficient way to specify colours in Processing¹ programs.