USING COLOR

  As you’ve seen, one way to add a splash of color to the black, gray, and white on your web pages is to ad images. However, several HTML attributes enable you to change the colors of the page itself, including changing the background color, changing the color of the text and links, and adding spot color to individual characters.

In this section, you’ll learn how to make all these changes in HTML 3.2.however,as is the case with most of the presentational attributes we’ve covered thus far, color attributes are deprecated in HTML 4.01 in favor of style sheets. You’ll learn more about the style sheet approach in lesson 9.

SPECIFYING COLORS

Before you can change the color of any part of an HTML page, you have to know what color you’re going to change it to. You can specify colors using the color extensions to HTML in two ways:

·         Using a hexadecimal number representing that color

·         Using one of set of predefined color names.

The most flexible and widely supported method of specifying a color is to use the numeric identifier. Most image – editing programs have what’s called a color picker – a tool for choosing a single color from a range of available colors. Some color pickers display the value of that color in RGB form as three numbers representing the intensity of red, green, and blue in that color, Each number is usually 0 to 255, with 0 0 0 being black and 255 255 255 being white. If you use one of these tools, you’ll have to convert the decimal numbers to hexadecimal. These days, most tools with color bickers also provide the hexadecimal values for red, green, and blue, which is what web browsers require. In fact, the color picker that’s built into the Mac OS includes the hexadecimal values to make things easy on web publishers.

The final hex number you need is all three numbers put together with a hash sign (#) at the beginning, as in the following.

#000000

#deo4e4

#ffff00

Netscape and internet explorer support a much easier way of indicating colors. Rather than using arcane numbering schemes, you just choose a color name such as Black, white, Green, Maroon, Olive, navy, purpled, gray, red, yellow, blue, teal, lime, aqua, fuchsia, or silver.

Although color names are easier to figure out and remember than the numbers, yonlya few colors have names that are well supported by web browsers. After you have a color name or number in hand, you can apply that color to various parts of your HTML page.

There are also a number of websites that are designed to help web designers choose colors. One of the best is color scheme at http://www.colorschemer. Com/onlin.html. it enables you to view several colors next to each other to see how they match, and will even suggest colors than match the ones you choose. The current color scheme interface appears in Figure 7.29.

FIGURE 7.29 color schemer.