What's with three letter colours now?

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 20:37:36 -0500, Stan Brown
<the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> wrote:

"Big Bill" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:
as opposed to six letter colours?

I'm seeing body {color: #fff; background: #000;} and stuff lately.
Is this a new form of abbreviation?

Yes, it was introduced only about ten years ago. :-)

Well I can't keep up with everything!
I ask as only a day or so ago I saw it for the firest time and as luck
would have it saw it twice.

BB
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On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 03:03:49 +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann
<bjoern (AT) hoehrmann (DOT) de> wrote:

* C A Upsdell wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:
Part of the HTML spec too. But beware: some old browsers can't handle
the 3-digit colours.

Which HTML spec (and according to which section in that spec?)

Y'know, I took a look at both the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs. The HTML
spec says nothing about the length of a hex colour code; the CSS spec
says that the code can be either 3 or 6 digits. So I'm not sure what
this means:...

It means it is not defined... Please write to www-html-editor (AT) w3 (DOT) org to
report errors in the HTML/XHTML specifications.

And since when is a "color" information of interest in a markup
language?

--
Rex

JRS: In article <udf6t01g41o7oujj52unrl91vtmkpadta8 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com>, dated
Wed, 29 Dec 2004 23:34:32, seen in news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.s
tylesheets, Big Bill <kruse (AT) cityscape (DOT) co.uk> posted :

Subject: What's with three letter colours now?

as opposed to six letter colours?

I'm seeing body {color: #fff; background: #000;} and stuff lately.
Is this a new form of abbreviation?

(1) The body of a News article should be related to, but not dependent
on, the Subject line.

(2) I note that others have, while being keen to score points, not
provided an explanation. So see

Cascading Style Sheets, level 1
W3C Recommendation 17 Dec 1996
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-CSS1

which includes :-

6.3 Color units

...

The format of an RGB value in hexadecimal notation is a '#' immediately
followed by either three or six hexadecimal characters. The three-digit
RGB notation (#rgb) is converted into six-digit form (#rrggbb) by
replicating digits, not by adding zeros. For example, #fb0 expands to
#ffbb00. This makes sure that white (#ffffff) can be specified with the
short notation (#fff) and removes any dependencies on the color depth of
the display.

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