Lately I have been noticing in webpages the colors being descripted as following: #ccc #888 #555 #bbb... only 3 letters! how are these colors built? Thx.
A color like this, #000 or #FFF or #777 just means that the next three letter are the same(#000000, #FFFFFF, #777777). I guess it just saves disk space. I use it quite a bit for white, balck, grey etc. This is a great site to find hex codes http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html
I'll explain a bit more in depth. Hex colours work by using Red Green and Blue outputs (RGB). 0 is the weakest you can get and F is the strongest. (All values are: 0123456789ABCDEF). So black is #000, which is no red, no green and no blue. #FFF is full red, full green and full blue, so the colour is white. Most of the time though, hex colors will go like: Red Red Green Green Blue Blue (RRGGBB). This way "00" is the weakest you can have and "FF" is the strongest. Using that way, white can also be #FFFFFF and black can also be #000000. You can of course combine: #FF00FF - which breaks up as: Full Red, No green and full blue: (Pink). It is best to use short colour codes where possible, though downloading the Opera widget "All the colours of the rainbow" may help you when getting started.
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