#todayilearned

by @jm3 · aka John Manoogian3

Frequent, bite-size mini-milestone updates as I fast-forward merge* my front-end web development skills up to 2019 levels. Learn more

The evolution of color names in CSS

Posted at — Jun 24, 2019

Today, while reading Mozilla’s CSS color developer docs, I learned that the list of CSS colors is not (and never was) equivalent to the full X11 named colors list.

Thus spake Mozilla:

The list of accepted keywords has undergone many changes during the evolution of CSS:

  • CSS Level 1 only included 16 basic colors, called the VGA colors as they were taken from the set of displayable colors on VGA graphics cards.
  • CSS Level 2 added the orange keyword.
  • Although various colors not in the specification (mostly adapted from the X11 colors list) were supported by early browsers, it wasn’t until SVG 1.0 and CSS Colors Level 3 that they were formally defined. They are called the extended color keywords, the X11 colors, or the SVG colors.
  • CSS Colors Level 4 added the rebeccapurple keyword to honor web pioneer Eric Meyer.

Read more on Mozilla.org.