3 ms·

Why are they called "web" colours? I understand that the term "web safe colour" is for colours that was within the space of 216 "safe colour" table, for displa

• EamonnMR 4y ago
  If I had to guess, it would be because they're the names you can use in place of RGB values in style/CSS
• kevincox 4y ago
  They are colours that have names in CSS. You can access 16M colours with #RRGGBB syntax but these colours are aliases to specific values and can be specified by name. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color
  • arethuza 4y ago
    Didn't those come from X11 - I'm sure I was using some of those for terminal settings long before the Web (let alone CSS).
    • dspillett 4y ago
      > Didn't those come from X11 Almost. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names#Clashes_between_web_and_X11_colors_in_the_CSS_color_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names#Clashes_betwee... I remember, way back when some of hadn't been born and the web was new and exciting, noticing the difference in greys when using the same colour names in a desktop tool's output and it's HTML documentation.
      • arethuza 4y ago
        I actually think I developed a preference for some colours and combinations based on using HyperNeWS, which had a particularly tasteful set of colour combinations (at least for 1990 or so!).