Maybe we'll get some old hands to tell the real story, but here's my guess: early web stuff all tended to be very permissive of the inputs, the idea being showi

Maybe we'll get some old hands to tell the real story, but here's my guess: early web stuff all tended to be very permissive of the inputs, the idea being showing a user some weirdly formatted half right page was better than showing them "html parse error" and nothing else. I suspect the guy who wrote the color parser wanted to do something other than fail on invalid color strings and just coded up the first thing he thought of to handle the invalid input cases.