Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by formerly_proven 1917 days ago
I had no idea there were this many named colors in CSS.

Turns out there are 16 HTML colors (upped to a whoppin' 17 colors in HTML4/CSS2.1) and around 124 named colors which originally came in due to X11. Since then, several colors have been added through various standards updates for a total of around 147 colors.

1 comments

Some of these colour names make little sense. For example, 'chocolate' is surprisingly light. 'brown' is red.
Most of the color names come from X11 rgb.txt which was not exactly "designed" to be anything and also many entries assume RGB color space of some particular Unix workstation which was decidedly non-sRGB (eg. using significantly different gamma curve).
Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU