Web-safe and CSS named colours: explained simply

Two lists of colours come from the early web. The web-safe palette was a set of 216 colours that displayed without speckling on the limited monitors of the 1990s. It is no longer needed. The CSS named colours are a set of English words, such as tomato, teal and papayawhip, that browsers accept in place of a code. They are still valid, and their history is odd.

tomato#FF6347teal#008080papayawhip#FFEFD5rebeccapurple#663399gray#808080darkgray#A9A9A9Web-safe #336699#336699

The web-safe palette

Many computers in the mid 1990s could show only 256 colours at once. Colours outside that set were faked by mixing dots of two others, which looked grainy. Browser makers settled on a palette that worked across systems. It allowed six evenly spaced levels of red, green and blue: 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF in hex. Six times six times six gives 216. Designers stuck to codes like #336699 for years. By the early 2000s most screens showed millions of colours, and the restriction faded away.

Named colours

The first web standard defined sixteen names, including black, white, red, navy, teal, olive and fuchsia. Browsers then adopted a much longer list from X11, a windowing system for Unix computers, whose colour names had been collected by various programmers in the 1980s, some from a box of crayons. The list was later written into the CSS standard and now runs to about 140 distinct colours. Nobody designed it as a set, which shows. It is crowded with pale pinks and beiges and thin on dark colours.

Quirks worth knowing

The two source lists clashed, so the colour named darkgray is lighter than the one named gray. Both spellings, gray and grey, are accepted. Aqua and cyan are the same colour, as are fuchsia and magenta. The newest name, rebeccapurple, was added in 2014 in memory of Rebecca Meyer, the young daughter of the web standards writer Eric Meyer. Names are convenient for quick tests and teaching. For real work designers use exact values, because a name says nothing about how a colour relates to the rest of a palette.

Colours on this page

TealA dark cyan named after the Eurasian teal bird’s blue-green head stripe Navy blueA deep blue shade named for the uniforms of the Royal Navy

Sources and further reading

About this page

Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.