Flash
The Gorge - Flash Bristow's Website
The unofficial list of HTML colors

Introduction
As you probably know, there are several official HTML colours, for example, see them here.

However if you type in another word for a colour name, it will usually come out black, but occasionally comes out as a colour. For example, crap.

Why this works
If you type an unrecognised colour the browser will try to convert it to an RGB format six character colour representation. So the browser takes the first six letters of your word, and breaks it into three two letter chunks, for R, G and B. Then these are looked at for hex characters, i.e. 0-9 and a-f. The first letter of each pair is looked at. If it is a-f it will be kept and used, and the second letter examined. If not, it will throw an error, and the second letter will not be looked at. Any unrecognised letters, spaces/gaps or letters which were not looked at are allocated 0.

So "crap" becomes "c0a000", and "banana" becomes "ba0000".

This explains why the colour "crap" is a horrid greeny-brown. However, most words won't give a colour as they translate to 000000. For example: vomit, yuk, puke.

The unofficial HTML colour list
So the challenge is now on to find the best colours - the most obscure, or those which are most like their names. So here is a list of alternative HTML colours, which may or may not resemble their name (a sort of visual onomatopoeia):

  • crap
  • bruise
  • United Kingdom
  • America
  • banana
  • grass
  • Staffelsee
  • Flash Wilson
  • Gorge.org
  • Mother
  • Father
  • Rabbit
  • nonsense
  • flibble
Try a colour
Just input your name, country, domain or any other word into the box and find out what colour it renders!
Which colour?

If you have a cool alternative colour to add to the list please let me know on this form.


This page last updated: 01 September 2022



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