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Hexidecimal is an ugly and deceptively
complicated-looking numbering system that is used to give browsers
(Netscape, IE and others) the names of colors you want to use on your web page.
Say you are kind of attached to lime green and you'd like to use it in your post.
How do you say "lime green" in hexidecimal? It reads something like this:
99FF33
Yes, to you and me it looks like a frightening string of letters and numbers. To browsers, though,
it reads green, lime green, and nothing else.
Before we go into the details, know that there are lots of online resources that will
choose a color from a color wheel and spit out the hexidecimal code that corresponds to it.
This means you never have to remember the sticky hexidecimal value of your favorite shade
of aquamarine; you can always go to a website instead and look it up.
Check out a helpful page we found. You will probably find your own favorites too.
If you want to know the nuts and bolts of the the hexidecimal system,
take note of the following few:
1. Hexidecimal numbers are maybe most intimidating because they
use letters as digits. In hexidecimal, the letter 'a' is a number,
and it is equal to the decimal value 11. 'f' is the equal to
the decimal value 15, which is as high as you can go if you are
counting with one hexidecimal digit.
Once you think you get it, take a minute and do this
quick quiz:
What is 1+1 in hexidecimal?
This one's a no-brainer: it's 2, just like in decimal.
Now, what's 9+3?
This one is more tricky: It's B. Yes B, the letter B, which
in hexidecimal is equal to the decimal number 12.
2. All HTML hexidecimal color values have six digits in them.
The first two determine the amount of red that is in the color, the next two
determine the amount of green and the last pair the amount of blue.
In the example above (99FF33), 99 determines the amount of red, FF the amount of green, and 33
the amount of blue.
3. FF is the highest hexidecimal value of one color that you can get in HTML, and 00 is the lowest.
If you see the color FF0000, then, you know that the red value is at its peak, while
the green and blue values are at their all-time low. A browser, then, will interpret
this color as red as red can be. 00FF00 will be as green as green can be, and 0000FF
will be as blue as it gets.
So say that now you've found the hexidecimal number that corresponds to the
color you want your text to be. How do you put it into your HTML? Like this:
Dear <font color="#CC00FF">gURL</font>:
When you look at this with a browser, it will read:
Dear gURL:
like this.
back to formatting color...
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