You may have noticed, when you read other parts of this tutorial, that colors are represented by a series of 6 numbers and letters.

For instance: <bgcolor=#334466>This is also applicable for fonts, links, and other items on a webpage.

When we specify color values this way, this 6 digit value is seperated into 3 seperate values. 33 represents the amount of Red in the color, 44 represents the amount of green available, and the final 66 represents the amount of blue in the color.

Each of these 2 digit numbers now represents a hexadecimal number with 255 possible values. (That’s odd you say, 00 to 99 is only 100 numbers isn’t it? True! But we’re not counting like your elementary school teachers taught you anymore, now we’re counting the way your computer does. So now, we can get a value of 256, by adding 6 letters. Following the 0-9 that we are accustomed to, we also use the letters A-F to represent 6 more numbers. So, to represent our 2 digit numbers, we would count like this: 00,01,02,03,04,05,06,07,08,09,0A,0B,0C,0D,0E,0F, all the way to FC, FD,FE, and FF which will represent a value of 256 (using only 2 characters.) S o a value of 00 or 10 for example would represent no or very little of that particular color in the end color, Whereas a value of FF or AA for example, would represent that there is a lot of that particular color in the end color.

Note: the following paragraph is not mandatory information for understanding web colors, but you sure can impress your friends with this knowledge. These alphanumeric numbers are properly refered to as “hexadecimal numbers” this means that we count based on a set of 16 numbers and letters – The sequence is as follows: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F after this, the sequence repeats itself by going: 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1A,1B,1C,1D,1E,1F ( as opposed to the decimal system that most of us learned in school, where we count 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16, etc)