16.243 why the #

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty (w.mccarty@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Oct 04 2002 - 01:27:01 EDT

  • Next message: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty : "16.244 styles of publication"

                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 243.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 06:24:23 +0100
             From: Enrico Pasini <enrico.pasini@unito.it>
             Subject: Re: 16.242 why the #

    Gioved, ottobre 3, 2002, alle 07:47 , Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
    ha scritto:

    >The definition of the <body> element [1] defines the content of the
    >bgcolor attribute thus:
    >
    > Colors are given in the sRGB color space as hexadecimal numbers
    > (e.g. COLOR="#C0FFC0"), or as one of 16 widely understood color
    > names. These colors were originally picked as being the standard 16
    > colors supported with the Windows VGA palette.

    The bgcolor attribute was first introduced by Netscape in the 1.1 release
    as an alternative to background images, with same syntax as text, LINK,
    VLINK, AND ALINK. There were at first no colour names, just #rrggbb values.
      From a Netscape doc of 1995 that can interestingly still be found at
    http://wp.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/bg/index.html:
    >THE BGCOLOR ATTRIBUTE
    >This attribute to BODY is not currently in the proposed HTML 3.0 spec, but
    >we're working on it. Basically, many people just want to change the color
    >of the background without having to specify a separate image that requires
    >another network access to load. This attribute allows just that. The
    >format that Netscape 1.1 understands is:
    ><BODY BGCOLOR="#rrggbb">Document here</BODY>
    >Where "#rrggbb" is a hexadecimal red-green-blue triplet used to specify
    >the background color.''

    The proposed format was in fact one of four or five to be found in the 1995
    CSS1 specs drafts that were developed in parallel to the unfortunate HTML
    3.0. The hash was used there to identify hex rgb values and differentiate
    "H1 { color: #FF0000 }" from "H1 { color: 255 0 0 }" (a big red heading,
    anyway).

    Ciao

    ep

    // enrico pasini //
    // enrico.pasini@unito.it //



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 04 2002 - 01:39:24 EDT