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Colour Selector
Colour exploration tools
Preview text
Navigate colour
Mix colour
Make swatches
Blend colour
Colour schemes
About the Colour Selector
About this resource
Tool overview
Tool short-cuts
Tool calculations
Other colour resources

About this resource

How it started

The Colour Selector was first launched in Dec 1996 and has been created by me, Paola Kathuria.

I'd generated background and text test pages for my own use, thought that other people may find them useful and so made them available online.

When I first started developing web sites, page colour, text colour and tiles weren't part of the HTML specification or the non-standard unofficial extensions to HTML.

As new tags were introduced, I noticed how browsers dealt with them and added my observations to a page of tricks and tips (for instance, from Netscape 3, I think, bgcolor was displayed first and the page tile last, hence my tip to always use bgcolor with tiles).

What it is built with

From 1996 to April 2001, the Colour Selector existed as simple HTML web pages.

In April 2001, the Text previewer was redeveloped in LML; a month later, the whole resource was converted to LML (LML is a scripting language like PHP but pre-dates it).

The Colour Selector has been designed within some self-imposed limitations because I think that, where a reasonable solution exists in standard HTML, a web site shouldn't depend on:

  • type of browser
  • browser version
  • plug-ins
  • screen size or browser width
  • number of colours that can be displayed