# Best tag for text size freedom in HTML???
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-tag-for-text-size-freedom-in-html/461332
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [August 26, 2008, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-tag-for-text-size-freedom-in-html/461332 "2008-08-26T17:57:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Stealth\_Potato](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stealth_Potato)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2008, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-tag-for-text-size-freedom-in-html/461332/21 "2008-08-28T01:40:32Z")
[QUOTE=Lobsang]
p.s. 256_256_256 = 16,777,216. And I am assuming you know what you are doing, so why does your number = one less than mine?
[/QUOTE]
Well, PHP’s rand() takes an inclusive range, so your original code was leaving off the colors from 16,700,001 to 16,777,215, the latter being the maximum value of an unsigned 24-bit integer (2^24 - 1). That’s a total of 77,215 colors omitted.
I think one reason you’re getting weird color results is because some of your color specifications are invalid. Numeric color values in HTML/CSS can only be 3- or 6-digit hex strings, e.g., #f042d1 or #a22. PHP’s dechex() does not do any padding; you get the shortest string containing a hexadecimal representation of the integer passed as the argument. So if your randomizer picks, say, 874161, the result of dechex will be D56B1, which is five digits long and not a valid HTML/CSS color value. I think invalid color values are ignored, so you’ll just get whatever color the element would have had without the style specification.
Additionally, the 3-digit color values will be interpreted differently than the 6-digit values. #fff will be white, for example, while #100000, a much higher number than #fff, will be a very dark red. To ensure that you’re actually getting a random sampling from the whole 24-bit color space, with 0 being black and 16,777,215 being white, you’ll need to pad the results of dechex() to 6 digits by prepending zeroes.
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