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Excellent read. I've been interested in developing some sort of tool to help me select, save, and organize colors for custom palettes. This will definitely help -- thanks!
Bleh, it seems they forgot to proof this or have it read by someone who ... I don't know, maybe knows a bit more about how it really works. When computers name a color, they use a so-called hexidecimal code that most humans gloss over: 24-bit colors. That is, 16,777,216 unique combinations of exactly seven characters made from ten numerals and six letters — preceded by a hash mark. I mean, "hexidecimal" is hopefully…
I also have a real problem with them referring to the second digit from the right as the "tens place", considering it's actually base sixteen...
Bleh, it seems they forgot to proof this or have it read by someone who ... I don't know, maybe knows a bit more about how it really works. When computers name a color, they use a so-called hexidecimal code that most humans gloss over: 24-bit colors. That is, 16,777,216 unique combinations of exactly seven characters made from ten numerals and six letters — preceded by a hash mark. I mean, "hexidecimal" is hopefully…
As someone who is colorblind, a lot of my design is based on the logic behind colors rather than looks. Of course, I always let an actual designer approve, tinker with, or redo my work. There are a lot of inaccuracies in this piece but I like the gist of it.
It's also an easy shorthand, because many developers/designers know the game, so you can just say "you know, Portal colors"
I'm all for designers learning a bit of the technical background behind colors on the web, but this article is full of technical inaccuracies, misconceptions, and misleading comparisons. "Tens place"? "24-bit color" ignores alpha and color palettes "# means 'This is a hex number'": No, it means a web color expressed as 3 hex numbers. Plus, I know it looks better to make your colors less saturated, but when you are de…
While the original article is somewhat misleading over why hexadecimal works the way it does, it's closer than you. The OP is trying to explain base-16 at the same time he's trying to describe basic RGB handling. Not everyone learns math in other bases at school (I didn't, I had to teach myself) so he had to cover it, and make use of familiar terms like "tens place".
On top of that, the explanation was presented in a highly visual way. There are a lot of visual learners who just don't get it when I try to explain just verbally, or just with the code.
The OP is right: the pound, or hash, sign is how the browser knows that the identifier is a hexadecimal sequence—just like compilers using 0xff00... to indicate hexadecimal numbers. #ff0000 is one hexadecimal number just like #ff000000 is. They aren't separate numbers, they just have different numbers of bits.
So what's going on here? Well, it's all about the bits, because 2 hexadecimal digits can express 0-255 or 1 byte. So this is actually a data structure of 3 bytes left-shifted into a single 32-bit integer.
#ff8060 (16744544) is the same as
// R G B
color = 255 // R G B A
color = 0 So why are hexadecimals widely used in CSS? Because they represent the actual data structure in memory after all the fancy conversions, like HSL, are done.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I felt like writing up an explanation of this anyhow. Might be useful to someone that didn't understand the why.
Trying to work with color in RGB triplets is like trying to assemble furniture with a plastic fork. Any discussion of color for programmers needs to be in terms of HSL, with a discussion of Lab for completeness and RGB for dealing with legacy systems.