CSS Tutorial by Paul Bohman

• Complex Style Declarations |
• Text, fonts, and font families

Colors

In the examples I've shown so far, I've typed out the names of colors, such as black, white, green, red, blue, etc. What if you want a non-standard color, such as "puce" or "dark bluish green" or a "really light gray with a hint of purple"? How do you specify those colors? The answer is that you have to use a hexadecimal code for the color, or use the RGB value. There are hexadecimal and RGB codes even for common colors such as black (hexadecimal code: #000000; RGB value: 0 0 0) or white (hexadecimal code: #ffffff; RGB value: 255 255 255), but hexadecimal codes are most useful for less common hues.

Note: RGB codes consist of the values of Red, Green, and Blue, respectively, on a scale of 0 to 255. Hexadecimal codes are just a bunch of strange combinations of numbers and letters invented by mathematicians with nothing better to do. You can quote me on that.

Dreamweaver can help you find the hexadecimal code for pretty much any color that you need, but not the RGB value, so I'm going to stick to hexadecimal codes here. When you create styles in the code view in Dreamweaver, a box of color options pops up to allow you to choose the color you're looking for. The box pops up as soon as you type the colon when defining color, background-color, or other color-related attributes.

You can then use the "eyedropper" tool to select the color you like. As soon as you select the color, the hexadecimal value of that color appears in the text.

If you click on the "color wheel" icon , you will be given even more color options to choose from.