Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the programming language which is used by web designers to  make web pages.  When a web designer wants to program the background color, the font color, the color of a table, etc, they must either use the color's Hexadecimal Code or one of the HTML Color Names in the HTML code. For example, to program the background color of a webpage, the following code is used:

                            <bgcolor="0000FF">

In the code above, "bgcolor"  stands for "background color" and "0000FF" is the hexadecimal code for the color "Blue".  However, a web designer may also use the word "Blue" instead of the hexadecimal code to make the background color of the web page turn blue. In that case, the code would be the following:

                           <bgcolor="blue">

If a web designer wanted to change the color of the words in a sentence from black to red, the "Font" tag would be used and the HTML code would be:

                          <font color="FF0000">The color of this sentence is red.</font>

If the web designer wanted to use the color name instead, the HTML code would be:

                          <font color="red">The color of this sentence is red.</font>

If you would like to see exactly how this works and would like to learn how to make a simple webpage, click here.

At the present time,  The World Wide Web Consortium is responsible for determining the standards or common protocols to be used on the internet by computer manufacturers, software companies, and other entities. The World Wide Web Consortium  was founded in October 1994, by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. It consists of  over  500 member from all over the world some of whom include Microsoft, MIT, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Intel,  IBM, etc.

To date, only 16 basic color names have been recognized by the The World Wide Web Consortium.  The rest have not been standardized. However, there are approximately 140 extended color names which are recognized by the latest versions of most browsers, including Netscape and Internet Explorer as well as "Front Page" which is the software used by many web designers when building websites.  We call these colors HTML Colors and the names used for them are called HTML Color Names.

The International Color Registry would like to help the World Wide Web Consortium by providing names for all of the 16,777,216 possible colors which  can be made on today's computers. We hope that our database will be used by the WWC in the future to help standardize the color names used for HTML. We also encourage web designers to use the data on this website when choosing colors.

If you would like to choose a  name for one of the millions of colors that are unnamed right now click here.