As you know, you can add colour to your posts. (No I am not the Grapist). This example was done using [COLOUR=Purple] (purposefully spelled with the U to allow for future uses of the tag)
There is a drop down when entering a post that gives a list of all colour names. Sure, it has your black, your sienna, your dark olive green, all the way to your plum and your white.
But those are not all the colours you can use. One notable exception is the colour “Crap”.
If you didn’t already know, crap - on the web at least - has this colour. This lovely shade was created with the tag [COLOUR=Crap] (again, remove the U when you try it yourself)
I forgot the exact reason, but it’s something to do with the binary equivalent of a chunk of text being translated into the RGB hex values for a color. Black is 000000, a medium gray would be 888888, white is FFFFFF, red is FF0000, green is 00FF00 and so on.
16.7 million colors and all that - what can be shown on-screen is not limited to the menu of red, yellow, blue, etc. (and yes, I am completely ignoring the concept of “web-safe” colors)
Damn work distracted me. Thanks gotpasswords for picking up my slack.
Yes, on the web you can identify a colour mixing values of Red Green and Blue (RGB) using six hex digits, two digits for each of those three colours in that order. FF (the highest two digit hex number) as the first two digits pure red, i.e. FF0000. Pure green is 00FF00, and pure blue is 0000FF.
So, this colour of red was produced by using the tag [COLOUR=FF0000] (removing the U)
Hex is not an everyday thing, so named colours were created. Normally you distinguish a named colour from a hex value by prefixing the hex with a #. But HTML, being a loosely conformed to standard, the # is not needed in most browsers (sorry Ice Wolf)
And that brings us to Crap. Because “crap” is not one of the recognized named colours, the browser says, “Okay, this must be a hex value” C is a valid hex digit, as is A, but R and P are not - so they’re thrown out. This leaves C0A000, which by amazing coincidence is a blend of red and green that closely resembles the colour of um crap.
Which, of course, proves that there IS a God and she has a sense of humour.
Which also, as YaWanna has illustrated, means that your name may also have its own colour. Mine is Nature’s Call Sorry Inigo.
You’re using hexadecimal numbers and many computers did 16 colors when thay came out. Every pixel on a graphics mode screen had a memory location that you stored a color’s number in to change that pixel. Filling the memory block that held the screen graphics with the same number changed the whole screen to one color. The lowest ressolution you can get Windows to display is 16 colors. 16 colors took up 4 bits. All the color modes for graphics went up by easly accessed memory hardware interfaces. The next improvement was 256 colors where each pixel was on byte or eight bits. 16 thousand was two bytes per pixel, and 24 million was 3 bytes per pixel memory interface. That’s where you get this kind of coincidence from.
