web color

Web colors, also known as hex codes and color codes, are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web; they can be described by way of three methods: a color may be specified as an RGB triplet, in hexadecimal format (a hex triplet) or according to its common English name in some cases. A color tool or other graphics software is often used to generate color values. In some uses, hexadecimal color codes are specified with notation using a leading number sign (#). A color is specified according to the intensity of its red, green and blue components, each represented by eight bits. Thus, there are 24 bits used to specify a web color within the sRGB gamut, and 16,777,216 colors that may be so specified. In hexadecimal, these are specified with two hexadecimal digits per color, leading to a total of six hexadecimal digits. In some contexts, it is possible to specify two more place values, which provide a transparency (alpha) channel.

Colors outside the sRGB gamut can be specified in Cascading Style Sheets by making one or more of the red, green and blue components negative or greater than 100%, so the color space is theoretically an unbounded extrapolation of sRGB similar to scRGB. Specifying a non-sRGB color this way requires the RGB() function call. It is impossible with the hexadecimal syntax (and thus impossible in legacy HTML documents that do not use CSS).