Brian Whitaker swaps 70s naff for 90s cool

The Guardian, 18 June, 1998

A READER enthuses about my Web site's colour scheme, which he likens to a fruitcake. "Those browns remind me of the flared suits they wore in TV programmes like The Sweeney or Bewitched," he says.

Detecting a note of sarcasm, I realise that Yemen Gateway ought to sack its marketing director if it had one. They were supposed to be the vibrant, earthy colours of a Yemeni landscape - sand, with outcrops of red-brown rock and the occasional splash of brilliant green, though nobody seems to have noticed.

I also wanted the colours to be, shall we say, highly distinctive. Because there are many links to other Web sites, I thought it would be helpful if the colours made people subliminally aware whether they were in my own site or someone else's. But no matter.

The fruitcake and flares have gone and Yemen Gateway is now in its summer plumage.

Before anyone criticises this time, I must point out that I borrowed the colours from a supplement in the Guardian last week, so they're totally unflared up-to-the-minute cool Britannia, and I'm sure Peter Mandelson would have e-mailed me by now if he disapproved.

Changing colours means changing every file, which was a terribly laborious process until a reader told me how to do it automatically with HotDog Pro (seehttp://www.al-bab.com/forum/). I downloaded it on 30 days' free trial, so I'm making the most of it. I gather from readers that after 30 days I should look for another program which does the same job, and download that on free trial for another 30 days - in this way I'll never pay for anything.

A few weeks ago, while still ignorant of the netiquette, I paid $30 to download some software and received an astonished e-mail from the vendor congratulating me on my honesty and claiming that the very survival of the Internet depended on the support of people like me. This left me glowing inwardly for days - so much so that I hadn't the heart to complain when the software didn't work.

Using colour on the Web is less complicated than it looks. For a start, there are 16 colours you can specify by name -etc. For something more subtle, visithttp://www.hidaho.com/colorcenter/cc.htmlwhere you can experiment on screen, then copy the resulting code and paste it into your own pages.

The code uses a hexadecimal counting system (based on 16 "numbers", running from 0 to 9 as usual but then continuing with A through to F). The six digits which specify a colour are actually three pairs. The left-hand pair gives 256 degrees of redness (ie 16 x 16). The second pair controls green and the third pair blue. Technically yellow does not exist - it's red and green together (to remember it, think of faulty traffic lights). For most purposes the second digit in a pair has so little effect that it's scarcely worth bothering with, so you can make things simpler by keeping both digits in each pair the same.

For example, FF0000 gives pure red because red is set at maximum and green and blue are set at zero. Reduce the red to AA and you take away some of the colour, turning it darker. FF00AA adds blue to the red, making purple. But if you also add green equal to the blue - FFAAAA - they cancel each other out, adding white which turns the red pink. For adjustments there's really no need to get into the maths: I use the "up-a-bit, down-a-bit" method. You can make a colour lighter by increasing all three pairs, or darker by reducing them. Once you’ve got the hang of it you'll happily waste hours mixing fruitcakes.

FEEDBACK:

• Bill Jillians- software abuse. 20 June 1998
• Joanne Ginnever- Website colours. 18 June 1998
• Tom Robinson- why learn HTML? 18 June 1998
  • Matt Faithfull- why learn HTML? 28 June 1998
  • Andy Jack- why learn HTML? 28 June 1998
  • Colin M Scott- why learn HTML? 26 June 1998
  • Rob Morris- why learn HTML? 28 June 1998

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