Background Colors
We've now learned a variety of ways to find resources on the Web.
Let's use some of these Web resources to help us modify your homepage
into something that looks a bit snazzier.
The "Body" HTML Tag
If you open your homepage file with the editor you will find near
the top an HTML "body tag" that has the following form
<BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffe0" TEXT="#ff0000"
LINK="#00ffff" VLINK="#00ffff" ALINK="#FF0000">
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Such tags control the colors for the text when a Web Browser displays
your page, according to the identifications in the following diagram
(note that in HTML the tags are generally not case sensitive; e.g.,
"BODY" and "body" are equivalent).
The labels in the diagram are rather self-explanatory in light
of earlier discussion except, perhaps, for the "accessed link" color.
This is the color that the link turns while the mouse button is
being held down. Thus, for example, the statement text="#ff0000"
sets the standard text color to red. Now obviously there is some
kind of secret code involved here: how do I know that #ff0000 means
to set the browser text color to red?
Hex Numbers and Color
Well, # indicates that this is a color and the next six characters
(ff0000) are in the form xxyyzz, where xx
is the amount of red, yy is the amount of green, and zz
is the amount of blue mixed to form the text color, with each of
these pairs (e.g., ff) a number in the base-16 or hexadecimal
number system---the "hex system", to those in the know.
Whew! I'm sure you are looking forward to learning about that!
If humans had 16 fingers and 16 toes instead of 10 each we probably
would know the base-16 system by heart, but it is unlikely that
many of you use hexadecimal numbers on a regular basis. Is there
a way to bypass studying the base-16 number system, at least for
now? After all, we just want to change some colors on our homepage!
You should learn something about the base-16 system because
it is so common in computers and because it is fun, but we will
save that for later. For now we are going to illustrate that we
can learn how to change colors on our homepages without learning
how to do base-16 numbers in our head. We shall do so by using resources
that are available on the Web. That is, we are going to set our
newly-won "Finding Things" expertise to a useful and noble task:
the avoidance of work in the process of accomplishing something
useful!
Color Resources on the Web
Your assignment is to modify the colors on your default homepage
to something more to your liking. What would greatly simplify that
is to have a table of colors with the associated hex code for the
color. Then we could find some colors that we liked from the table
and just copy the corresponding hex code into the body tag in our
homepage. Even better, in the best of worlds we might hope for a
computer program that would allow us to click on a continuous dispay
of colors to select them, and once they were selected, to display
a sample page with those colors to see how they actually look in
a browser display.
Such resources are out there on the Net. We can use search engines
to find them. Pick one of the search engines, type in words or a
phrase such as "hex code" and see if you can find a hex table of
colors.
The results page should have many links. Find a hex table there
that will help you select colors for your homepage. Select some
new colors to customize your homepage by changing the colors in
the "body" tag.
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