From this thread:
Fun with Colors
Why does IE render non-standard names as colours?, for example:
mangetout
Which should appear as pale green in IE (even though ‘mangetout’ isn’t a standard colour name (pity))
(The HTML for the above, as it appears on your screen is:
<font color="mangetout">mangetout</font>
Different names give different colours, i.e.:
rhubarb
custard
trousers
fishcake
spam
What is IE actually doing (or trying to do) in order to come up with these colours?
I suspect that ever-helpful Bill Gates and the happy boys and girls at Microsoft have defined a whole raft of extended colour constants - I recall reading a huge list of these in the documentation for Merchant Server 1.0 (yes, I know that dates me), including such gems as “spicy pink” and “old gold”. Basically (or Visual Basically - ha! I’m so funny!) there’s a massive list of constant definitions that bind these things to standard colour codes in #RRGGBB hex format. Though, looking at the colour of your rhubarb and custard, I wonder if some of these bindings have slipped a bit. (I can think of one reason why custard would be that colour, but it’s a bit 1970’s-cartoons-ish…)
There is now an extended list of named colours (non-W3C), but ‘fishcake’ isn’t part of it.
( Named colours )
I suspect IE attempts to guess which colour you meant by ‘fishcake’ (etc), but I have no idea how it’s deciding which colour to use as a replacement.
Internet Explorer takes non-valid color names (I believe there are 140 officially defined color names, though I’ve seen references to 216), and converts them to Hex Values. But it takes anything that is not between A-F or 0-9 and turns them into a 0.
For example:
FISHCAKE = RGB VALUE #F000CA00
As long as it has four letters, you’ll get a color other than black.
For instance, FISHZZZZ will get you the same value as FISH (it happens to be the same RGB value as FISHCAKE), but FIS will be black.
You can use this site to convert HEX values to RGB values if you want to try it out.
Thanks Starbury.
Try this site, it’s done by a former cow-orker of mine. He sells his posters and mousepads as aids to web designers and he’s got some free utilities available also, my favorite would be the color lab.
He also developed his own completely consistent nomenclature system where each color has a TLA; for example Dark Hard Magenta, DHM, is CC00CC.
This site is worth your time, I promise. 
I don’t quite understand why IE seems to respond to more than the first six digits (i.e. three pairs: R G and B) of the hex colour.
OK, I’ll try:
[font color=“Tikki”]Tikki[/color]
You forget that IE is the prostitute of web browsers. It will do anything to get laid, er, open a web page.
Please don’t bump old threads.
This is closed.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator