| HexadecimalThe last thing we want is to patronise you or offend your knowledge of mathematics, but to understand how Hexadecimal works, you must realise the basics of Decimal to use as a comparison. Take, for example, 209710. The "10" means "base 10" or decimal. This number can be represented by In the same way, a hexadecimal or base 16 number, such as 83116 can be represented by You may notice that some of the hexadecimal outcomes contain letters. These letters are only a-f. They represent values larger than 9.
"But why is hexadecimal so important?" I hear you ask. When creating a web-page, you need to know hexadecimal for getting the colours of background and text right for your design. At this point, you should note something which contradicts what you have been taught in art lessons - the primary colours of light are RED, GREEN and BLUE. To make your lives as programmers easier, here is a colour mixer: Now that you know how to use this handy program, you need to know how to use the hexadecimal code it produces.The BODY tag has an attribute called "bgcolor". Notice the American spelling of "color" - there is no "u". To use it, make the tag look like this: <body bgcolor="#7f7f7f"> There are other attributes which use hex colour codes. These are text, link, vlink and alink. We will shortly see what the effect of the text attribute is, but the link, vlink and alink effects will be explored in week 2. |