HTML Color Shades

Shades of Gray

Gray colors are displayed using an equal amount of power to all of the light sources.

To make it easy for you to select a gray color we have compiled a table of gray shades for you:

The color names of HTML / CSS was inherited from the X11 standard.

HTML / CSS defined gray at the midpoint of the 8-bit gray scale (128,128,128).

X11 defined gray to be (190,190,190); which is closer to HTML silver.

Gray / Grey Web Colors

There are several gray color names in HTML / CSS.

All gray colors are spelled as gray (not grey).

This spelling was inherited from the X11 standard.

All modern browsers accept both gray and grey, but early versions of Internet Explorer did not recognize grey

Shades of Red

If you look at the color table below, you will see the result of varying the red light from 0 to 255, while keeping the green and blue light at zero.

Click on the hexadecimal values, if you want to analyze the color in our color picker.

16 Million Different Colors

The combination of Red, Green and Blue values from 0 to 255 gives a total of more than 16 million different colors to play with (256 x 256 x 256).

Most modern monitors are capable of displaying at least 16384 different colors.

Web Safe Colors?

Many years ago, when computers supported maximum 256 different colors, a list of 216 "Web Safe Colors" was suggested as a Web standard (reserving 40 fixed system colors).

This is not important now, since most computers can display millions of different colors.

This 216 hex values cross-browser color palette was created to ensure that all computers would display the colors correctly when running a 256 color palette: