Re: Color in HTML

Timothy Hunt <T.Hunt@ee.surrey.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 00:01:51 +0200
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From: Timothy Hunt <T.Hunt@ee.surrey.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Color in HTML
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David Koblas <koblas@netcom.com> wrote:
> I was noticing the other day that besides using IMG's for bulleted lists.  
> The next most common use of inline images was to do "spot color".  
> 
> I know that HTML is not a formatting langauge, but it does present information 
> and visual cues to attract peoples attention are very useful devices.  
> It would be useful to be able to specify color in documents, for a variety
> of reasons.  From fun/silly things like this:
> 
> 	<P>John ate the <NEW_TAG COLOR=RED>red</NEW_TAG> apple.
> 	While Jill played in the <NEW_TAG COLOR=GREEN>green</NEW_TAG> grass.

Not necessarily fun/silly - it could be used for education...

> 
> Things where there can be:
> 	<STRONG COLOR=MAGENTA>Accessing this services costs $50.</STRONG>
> 
> It might also be reasonable to specify the color properties at other
> places, like <LI> tags to specify the color of the bullet rather then
> loading an <IMG> at that point.

The main thing I would do to what David wrote is a global search/replace
of "specify" to "recommend"

HTML, as David points out is not a formatting language.  Some browsers
may not be able to display different colours at all, they may only be
able to display a limited number of colours at a time, or the total
number of colours may be limited.
[Note - these are NOT the same - I might be able to display blue, green,
red, yellow, cyan, magenta, black, and white - but supposing I wanted
text in grey or orange only...].

What the browser does in such cases will be browser dependent.

And even if the browser tells the server that it accepts "BLUE" as one of
its known colours, how do you know that what the browser thinks is BLUE
and what the server thinks is BLUE tally?

regards,

TJH
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/People/T.Hunt.html