Some of those color names really don’t match their appearance.
Some of this is kinda cool. I will [del]steal[/del] appropriate. 
Yeah I noticed that. For example, this is GRAPE? And this is FLESH? And this is CHERRY? Really?
As I tested to see if different color names worked (using Wikipedia’s Lists of colors (compact), I noticed a few things.
(1) Color names with more than one word failed.
Examples:
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=DARK RED
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=OLIVE DRAB
-
- DARK RED and OLIVE DRAB don’t even register as colors*
(2) Some color names do register as a color, but aren’t even close. Some examples were given above:
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=GRAPE - grape, a shade of purple, comes out in a shade of blue
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=FLESH - flesh, a shade of pink, comes out in a shade of yellow
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=CHERRY - cherry, a shade of red, comes out in a shade of green
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● WWWWW: COLOR=CHESTNUT - chestnut, a shade of brown, comes out in a shade of red
- DARK RED and OLIVE DRAB don’t even register as colors*
(3) Some color names do register as a color, but come out in black ink. I suppose this is a sub-category of #2.
Appropriate away!
There are some color names that web browsers recognize as names. Those come out about like you’d expect, like red and magenta. If a browser doesn’t recognize the name, though, then it tries to interpret it as a hexidecimal label. So if a word has any letters from A-F in it, it’ll show up as something. Thus, for instance, in cherry, the only letters which actually matter are the C and the E, with everything else interpreted as a 0. So you’d get the same result from C0E000 or czezzz. And since hex color labels are always six digits, you’d also get the same result from, say, cherriesandcreme, because the extra “digits” are truncated.
Here’s a link to a list of all the actually valid color names in HTML5.*
If you wonder where they came from: they are the 16 EGA colors that came from DOS, plus the colors most commonly mapped on Linux’s X11 window system. Plus all the grays are duplicated, one with “gray” and one with “grey.” Slight changes have been made when colors didn’t quite fit, but that’s the basics. (Even today, DarkGray is lighter than Gray.)
*The board technically uses XHTML 1.0 (the XML version of HTML 4.0), which didn’t technically define the colors, but HTML5 (with CSS) defines them, and that’s what browsers use today.
Cool, thanks. You’re getting pretty geeky there, though.
Actually I did try some hex, like WWWWW: color=#FFFFFF.
Thanks! Good to know.
And you don’t know how tempted I was to Stroop that post.
Strooping already happened upthread:
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● GRAPE
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● FLESH
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● CHERRY
WWWWW ➤ ★ ● CHESTNUT
- off to urban dictionary Stroop *
- NB: “urban dictionary” is a verb like Google *
Problem, and unfortunate usage subjective note:
My first response to Stroop is of the military man in the Stroop Report.
These posts are like a code from a crazy person that civilaztions millions of years from now will ponder upon.
Testing <CR><LF> chars – seen or not?
Who Posted?
Total Posts: 34,584
User Name – Posts
Bullitt – 5,001
Elendil’s Heir – 4,285
ElvisL1ves – 3,149
RealityChuck – 2,286
Northern Piper – 1,941
Annie-Xmas – 1,549
jtur88 – 1,494
Sampiro – 1,455
Siam Sam – 1,339
Cunctator – 1,332
astorian – 1,241
Sternvogel – 981
So why are Cherry and Chestnut different colors? In your explanation, Chestnut also gets interpreted as C0E000.
Hm, that’s a good question. All I can figure is that some browsers (including Firefox, apparetly) go beyond the standard color-name list and recognize that one, too. But I don’t think that’s quite the shade of brown that I’d call “chestnut”, which I thought was lighter.
Testing some other colors that might have been included by someone who would include chestnut
Auburn (should be a slightly dark slightly-greenish yellow)
Blond (should be a slightly dark purple)
Hazel (should be close to black, but slightly greenish-yellow)
Strawberry (should be close to black, but slightly greenish-blue)
OK, all of those come out about how I expected except for strawberry, which is much greener than it should be.
If it matters, I posted #20 using Safari on an iPad. But that shouldn’t matter. What should matter is the browser being used to view the post.