Colour Names for HTML/CSS and their RGB Values

A huge variety of colour names exists and you may easily find thousands of charts with colour names on the web. Unfortunately, many of these are not applicable to web authoring as they contain non-standard names. In HTML 136 names are allowed and in CSS2.1 only 17 names, based on the 16 VGA colours plus - new in this CSS version - the colour Orange. The first chart lists these valid CSS colour names.

The HTML colour names entirely lack any systematic logic. While some names are easy to memorize, others have totally weird names, like PapayaWhip. Included in the 136 valid HTML colour names are the 17 valid CSS colour names. I have, however, included a couple of more names, which are invalid and must not be used. They serve as a means to show how browsers react to these invalid values. The Opera browsers, for example, does support some of these names due to some strange and unknown reason. Notice, that some names appear twice in the chart. This enables you to compare the standard appearance and the wrong one.

No distinction is made concerning uppercase or lowercase letters. It is however highly recommendable to use mixed lettering with regards to readability, as the following example shows:

lightgoldenrodyellow vs. LIGHTGOLDENRODYELLOW vs. LightGoldenRodYellow

The chart has the following structure:

A big cell shows the colour name and beneath the hexadecimal colour value. The background of this cell is styled by using this hexadecimal value. Names marked with an asterisk (*) are non-standard or double names and must not be used in web authoring.

There are two smaller cells beneath this big one. In the first of these, named CSS, the background is styled using the CSS syntax while the background of the second cell, named HTML, is styled using the HTML bgcolor property in association with the colour name.

The following example shows how the colour BrightGold is rendered in the browsers Netscape 7.1, Internet Explorer 6.0, and Opera 7.23. Notice, that this colour name is not valid. Netscape totally ignores the name, while Internet Explorer only ignores the CSS value but produces a dark red HTML background colour. The parser obviously takes the letters of the colour name which make sense as hexadecimal values and constructs some new value - in this case B0000D which is then rendered. Opera takes a third approach. This colour name seems to be hardcoded into Operas parser thus Opera renders right backgrounds both for HTML and CSS syntax.

The chart may be displayed either in alphabetical order or in order of descending hexadecimal values

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Colour Names [A - Z] Colour Values [F - 0]

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