Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF
I’ve never really used regular color names in my CSS styles, preferring to stick to HEX values I get from Photoshop. I was a little surprised then to see this, a long list of CSS color names that are “supported by all major browsers”. It starts with AliceBlue, an almost ethereally light blue, goes on to Chartreuse and FireBrick and HoneyDew… there’s even a pretty light lavender shade called Thistle, which I’m now seriously considering painting my guest bathroom in.
But then- aha. Apparently, despite all these lovely color names being supported by major browsers, the W3C have listed that only sixteen of these color names are “valid”. They are (and why these particular colors, I’m not exactly sure- although they do seem to cover all bases):
- Aqua
- Black
- Blue
- Fuchsia
- Gray
- Green
- Lime
- Maroon
- Navy
- Olive
- Orange
- Purple
- Red
- Silver
- Teal
- White
- Yellow
Of course, nobody wants to be remembering color names these days- and when I don’t want to open up Photoshop, I turn to Chirag Mehta’s Name that Color, which gives you the color name, its hex value, and its RGB values.
If you have a little more time on your hands, check out the very awesome Color Scheme Designer, which can keep me busy for hours. It sports a quick-loading, and lovely, interface, as well as “page examples” with your chosen color palette. You get hex values upon rollover, or you can export in several formats.
How do you use colors in CSS?
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Being on a mac, you can find lots of resourceful widgets to run on your Dashboard. That said, I love this particular widget and use it all the time. It’s called ColourMod and can be found at http://colourmod.com/dashboard/
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Mark- I hadn’t heard of that widget. Trying it out now- thanks very much!
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can i hv more info about this widget
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Historically, I’ve done color picking with a graphic app color selector and then grab the hex value from there. Every now and then I’ll use the word ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘red’. Coming from a linux background where apps like the terminal and emacs support the use of named colors I find them very useful. ‘GoldenRod’ is much easier to remember than ‘#DAA520′. I’ll admit, it’d be great to be able to specify a color name and an alpha value (e.g. ‘GoldenRodff’).
ColorSchemeDesigner is VERY cool. In fact, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for lately. Thanks, Lorraine!
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That’s pretty cool widget. I tend to use “Color Picker” it’s the first one if you google that on the web.