Special Characters
Some characters in HTML markup have special meanings. To display these characters you must use the following Markup. There are many more than in this list but these are the ones I find most useful and recognized by Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari browsers.
| Name | Symbol | Markup |
| ampersand | & | & |
| less than | < | < |
| greater than | > | > |
| quote | " | " |
| bullet | • | • |
| trade mark | ™ | ™ |
| copyright | © | © |
| left pointing guillemet | « | « |
| right pointing guillemet | » | » |
| ellipsis | … | … |
| em dash | — | — |
| en dash | – | – |
| non-breaking space | ' ' | |
| em space | ' ' |   |
| right arrow | → | → |
Color Names
RGB stands for Red Green Blue and are the negative image of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow respectively. If you look at your ink get printer you will probably find Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are the ink colors used. CMY added together give you black, RGB added together give you white. You will frequently see CMY referred to as CMYK. The K is for black. Adding a photo black to the color mix makes it easier to get pure black. When specifying colors you need not be concerned with black as a separate color. It's much easier to visualize mixing Cyan, Magenta and Yellow which will yield any color of the spectrum than to relate to the results of subtracting Red, Green and Blue. RGB is however the standard way of representing color in the digital world. Applications that require the user to specify RGB almost always have color picking aids.
In HTML the RGB color definitions yield (256 x 256 x 256) combinations. Sixteen of these colors can be referred to by Name and represent a good starting point for selecting colors because they are recognizable on any PC monitor. There are times when you will need finer control to achieve an effect. A good example is my careful use of color to depict the lit and shadowed sides of a 3D button. FYI — I've also provided the 6 digit hexadecimal coding. The 3 digit hex coding is possible when the red, green and blue components all have values represented by a pair of the same digit. 3 digit RGB yields (16 x 16 x 16) combinations.
The number of colors viewable will depend on the number of color bits associated with each monitor pixel and the viewers vision. Note that some image types like GIF only store 8 bits per pixel yielding 256 colors. Reducing bits per image pixel reduces file size which improves web size performance and will increase the appearance of image sharpness. Most monitors support 24 bit color depth which yields excellent photographic results.
The BORDER-COLOR property value can be specified as a single color which then applies to all 4 sides. When 4 values are specified they apply in order to the top, right, bottom and left. When 2 values are specified the 1st is the top and bottom while the 2nd is the left and right. MARGIN and PADDING are specified in a similar fashion — 1, 2 or 4 values.
| Name | #RRGGBB | #RGB |
| Aqua | #00FFFF | #0FF |
| Black | #000000 | #000 |
| Blue | #0000FF | #00F |
| Fuchsia | #FF00FF | #F0F |
| Gray | #808080 | |
| Green | #008000 | |
| Lime | #00FF00 | #0F0 |
| Maroon | #800000 | |
| Navy | #000080 | |
| Olive | #808000 | |
| Purple | #800080 | |
| Red | #FF0000 | #F00 |
| Silver | #C0C0C0 | |
| Teal | #008080 | |
| White | #FFFFFF | #FFF |
| Yellow | #FFFF00 | #FF0 |