Tay Vaughan - Netscape Palettes

This color tool allows you to quickly choose background, text, and link colors. You can select a combination of colors and copy the correct <BODY> tag into your HTML documents using Timestream Colors.

Click and drag the mouse across the palette of colors. Find a combination of background and text colors that you like: click on a radio button and then choose a color for that attribute. Colors automatically creates the <BODY> tag and places it on the clipboard, ready for pasting into an HTML document.

The RRGGBB hexadecimal red-green-blue triplet is how a color is described to an HTML browser so it can properly display the colors of your HTML document. The value represented by "RR", "GG", or "BB" is a hexadecimal value in the range of 0 to 255 describing the iuntensity of the red, green, or blue color: 00 (the decimal value of 0) means that that color component is totally off and FF (the decimal value of 255) means that the color is totally on. When you mix varing amounts of red, green, and blue colors, the results can be a rainbow from 000000 (black) to FFFFFF (white).

The colors in the Timestream Colors color palette are the special 216 colors and the 40 system colors used by Netscape Navigator and Windows for displays in 8-bit mode. If you use one of the Timestream Colors colors in your document, it will display without dithering or mixing two or more different colors to approximate the selected color.

The Netscape Navigator(tm) and Microsoft Explorer(tm) browsers support use of color names, so you do not need to know the hexadecimal triplet for a color, but just type in the name instead, for example <BODY BGCOLOR="black">. But these named colors are not always one of the 256 colors available on Windows or Macintosh computers running in 8-bit mode, so they may be dithered on these displays. Timestream(r) Colors(tm) will insert the name of a selected color into the <BODY> tag, and show its closest location in the 8-bit color picking palette.

Click on the Default button to reset your colors to Netscape Navigator's default colors which are:

<BGCOLOR="#CCCCCC" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#FF00FF" ALINK="#FF0000"> or Very Light Gray, Black, Blue, Magenta, and Red.

HTML: The BGCOLOR and TEXT attributes of the <BODY> tag

Background color and text color are attributes of the <BODY> tag in an HTML document, so you can only set the background and link colors for an ENTIRE document. You cannot change coloring part way through a document, but you can change portions of text using the <FONT Color="#RRGGBB"> and the <TABLE BGCOLOR="#RRGGBB"> attributes. The backgrounds of table rows <TR>, data <TD>, and headers <TH> can also be colored.

The LINK, VLINK, and ALINK tags

These tags let you control the coloring of link text. VLINK stands for visited link, and ALINK stands for active link. The default coloring of these in most browsers is typically: LINK=blue, VLINK=magenta, and ALINK=red. Again the format for these attributes is the same as that for BGCOLOR and TEXT.