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ADDING COLOUR TO OUR LIVES or EXPANDING THE BODY TAGPainter's palette

On the Internet, and by your computer, all colours are determined by the hexadecimal system, which in a nut shell, using base 16 (Our decimal system uses base 10 – 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, base 16 uses 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F; yes I agree it looks really weird) to give us 256 shades of red, blue and green which in turn give us 256 * 256 *256 different colours which is a really big number (16777216 to be exact) and more shades of nail polish than I'll ever have J . Each complete color is 6 characters long. The first two are for red, the second two are for green, and the third set of two is for blue. 00 ( the same as 0) is the smallest number and FF ( the same as 255)is the largest. The bigger the number, the more white that is added to the color, the smaller the number, the more black that is added to the colour. If you hear some one talking about a RGB colour, they are referring, to this color scheme.

Lucky for all of us, most editors (including corel wordperfect and MS word) let us choose from a colour palette. But this painting lesson certianly falls under the good info to know category. There are also many websites dedicated to helping you find the perfect RGB purple to match with your dream shade of orange.

Once you understand the colour system, you can add colour to the body and text of your webpage. These commands take the form of an equation and are placed inside the first <BODY> tag after the word BODY with a space between each. The structure is always NAME="#FFFFFF". Substitute the colour you want for the FFFFFF. Make sure it is in quotes and the # sign is present. Below is a table with the names of the "EQUATIONS" and what they do.

NAME

FUNCTION

EXAMPLE

bgcolor

background colour

bgcolor="3ffffff"

text

default text colour

text="#000000"

link

link colour

link="#0000ff"

alink

active link colour

vlink="#ff0000"

vlink

visited link colour

alink="#00ff00"

 

Here is an example of code for a plain Jane webpage where the body is white, the text is black, the links are blue, the active links are green and the visited links are red.


<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>MY VERY BASIC PLAIN JANE BORING WEBPAGE</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#ff0000" alink="#00ff00">
the good stuff goes here
</BODY>
</HTML>

Learn more about hexidecimal colour at HTML goodies .... Hexadecimal Color Chart