HTML colors

Our tutorial this week walked us through the basics of working with HTML. Not far into the lesson, the tutorial gave a brief explanation of the html colors. It explained the hexadecimal annotation that looks like #000000 in which the first two zeros represent the amount of red, the second two the amount of green and the final set the amount of blue. The values for these digits range from 0 to 9 and then from a to f. A “00” represents the absence of the particular color while the ff means a full blast of the particular color. Consequently, #000000 is black or the absence of all three colors. While, #ffffff, the combination of all colors, is white as it is with light (illustrated in our grade school science classes with a prism). With 16 different possible values for each of these digits, there are 16 million different colors that are possible. Yet, the tutorial indicated that only 216 colors (scroll half way down the linked webpage to see them) are web safe, aka consistent across most browsers and operating systems. In looking for the web safe colors, I also found that there are 150 color names that are supported by all browsers. Considering my Crayola box only had 32 colors, I don’t feel particularly limited by these numbers although I suspect that may just be naivety. With this public documentation, we will all get to see as my opinions change over the semester.

greenhorn

Welcome to my very first blog. As an introductory blog, it only seems appropriate to give a brief who, what, when, where and why. So here you have it:

• Who: Rebecca Osborne, your fellow MIT student
• What: A place on the internet to ponder the capabilities, the components and the wonders that are the internet.
• When: Weekly from now up through the middle of December
• Where: Right here at http://RebeccaAtUGA.blogspot.com
• Why: To simply be better at what I do everyday. Like all of us, I am here to further my career, feed myself, pay my mortgage, buy pretty things…..

I am a member of the segment of the class that does not come equipped with a technical background. As I pick my way through not just this course but the program, I suspect that my posts and presentations will sometimes lean to the oversimplification of concepts as I work to build a strong technical foundation.

I’d also like to point out that I am already motivated by my fellow classmates. In our first IT class, one of my groups was a clump of other “non-technicals”. When given the Network Layer of the OSI Model to review, discuss and then explain to the class, my group did not get overwhelmed by the technical jargon. Instead they picked through and searched each word they didn’t understand to breakdown the definition into something intelligible. I’ll be remembering that persistence each time I find myself staring at sentences that I don’t understand over the next two years. So, thanks Patrice, Courtney and Ali.