I am trying to find out who picked the 140 "named colors" and why those particular colors were picked....were these based on something already existing? They are definitely prettier colors than the supposed "web safe" colors :-)
pelican
6:37 pm on Dec 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
so noone knows? :-)
ncw164x
6:42 pm on Dec 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
I checked at google when you first posted the question and nothing is listed there about how the 140 named colours are named, you are quite right in saying that the 140 colours do look better than the "web safe" colors.
ncw164x
choster
6:55 pm on Dec 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
The 16 named colors in CSS correspond to the 16 VGA colors. The other named colors, IIRC, are just the 140 colors adopted in Netscape Navigator 1.1, which in turn are based on the X11 color set (X11 is another name for the X Window System, a graphical user interface for Unix).
And who picked them for X? Who knows. Who picked <td> for table cells instead of <cell> or window.getElementById(myid) instead of window.getElement[id=myid]?
pelican
12:24 am on Dec 15, 2003 (gmt 0)
They seem to correspond in large part to the colors you find in pantone color guides....the colors you might expect in home improvement projects, etc....so I thought maybe someone w ho has design experience might know some history of how those colors were named and how they were selected...