A blank HTML document would have default font and text settings if it were opened in an Internet Explorer browser. The settings would look something like this if it were presented in an internal style sheet:

The first part, "font-face: Times New Roman" tells the browser that the web page is using a Times New Roman font and the second part, "color: #000000" tells the browser that the color of the text will be #000000... So what does "#000000" mean? Well, that's what this article is about.

The value "000000" is actually a set of three hexadecimal numbers, each digit represents a value for Red, Green, and Blue respectively; RRGGBB. These hexadecimal codes can be referred to as a triplet, or a group of three hexadecimal numbers.

Each digit in the hexadecimal system is a value from 0 to F. The hexadecimal color system counts by 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, with "0" being null value, and "F" being highest value of fifteen. The following table will help you understand the system a little easier:

The largest value you can assign to one of the values of red, green or blue is FF, which is 255 in the normal decimal system. If we assign a hex color value of "#FF0000" this would display the most amount of red as possible. The code's value has the green and blue values set to null and so there would be no green or blue color present.

There are only 216 colors that are considered "safe" for web browsers. These browser-safe colors should only contain the following values: 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF. You can view a list of all the safe colors that you can use on your web page by visiting the color reference chart linked at the end of this article.

You can add color to your own website easily. Let's say you want your text to be blue; all you would have to do is put this into your header:

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