do people actually use color names in webdev?
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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I sometimes do for testing. Is this css working? I don't know, change the background to red as that will stand out
Red? Hotpink or bust!
You know you're desperate when you bust out that background-color: red
When you are wishing you could do !!importanter you know things are getting real desperate
me literally every time
I think so
I don't, except the "red means testing" scenario. It's 1½ keystrokes less than #f00
Red green blue when setting a BG color to remember a layer, but that's it.
Now put the dark grey on a white background and grey on a black background and, tada, dark grey is darker!
Fooled by the human mind itself.
Gonna open an issue with the W3C to rename gray and darkgray to notwhite and notblack, respectively. I'm sure that will help
Notblack is very problematic language
Notblack code lines matter
I never ever use these names. My guess is they're a carryover from some Web 1.0 rule and not originally specific to CSS.
Once at a job when I was supposed to make a website work (and I'll stress, I am not a graphic designer and wasn't hired as one!) I made the layout as nice as I could, but I insisted on only using named CSS colors because I just do. not. care. about color theory. By which I mean, I don't want to waste time and do a crappy job at it when someone else could do it much better and properly and faster. So the named colors are meant as an obvious placeholder for a more creative person to replace with something real later.
When my boss gave me feedback he just said that it's ugly. I started saying "yeah, the colors are placeholders, we can change that easily. I'll fiddle it with it I'll stick with named colors" (above explanation was to follow).
Before I even got to the named colors bit, he interrupted me and said "don't use named colors ever".
I guess maybe I was hired as a graphic designer? News to me!
(I'm making him sound awful but he was actually a really good boss. This interaction is not representative of our usual dynamics. I'm not employed by him anymore but we are on good terms.)
Before I even got to the named colors bit, he interrupted me and said “don’t use named colors ever”.
He recognized the tones. Used to be known as "web friendly" a long time ago.
One notable difference between X11 and W3C is the case of "Gray" and its variants. In HTML, "Gray" is specifically reserved for the 128 triplet (50% gray). However, in X11, "gray" was assigned to the 190 triplet (74.5%), which is close to W3C "Silver" at 192 (75.3%), and had "Light Gray" at 211 (83%) and "Dark Gray" at 169 (66%) counterparts. As a result, the combined CSS 3.0 color list that prevails on the web today produces "Dark Gray" as a significantly lighter tone than plain "Gray", because "Dark Gray" was descended from X11 – for it did not exist in HTML nor CSS level 1 – while "Gray" was descended from HTML. Even in the current draft for CSS 4.0, dark gray continues to be a lighter shade than gray. Some browsers such as Netscape Navigator insisted on an "a" in any "Gray" except for "Light Grey".
"Gray" with an A looks so wrong to my eyes. I don't think I ever see it used normally.
"Grey if it's in England, gray if it's in America."
Same as tire vs tyre, center vs centre and so on.
I am an American living in America, still looks weird.
I knew it'd be something like that. Don't try to fix it, would be my advice. BTW my rgb.txt seems to have 2 entries for every tone of grey resp. gray.
I literally only use them when testing.
nah, that's clearly gray-400 and gray-600.
I'm not a programmer but using hsl() seems so much easier and intuitive but only once you remember the hue of typical colors. Setting shades from another colours is also easy peasy with variables.
Obviously still setting a background to red/green (named) to test if a selector is correct and general testing.