How to Set Text and Background Color with CSS

See CSS: Tips and Tricks for similar articles.

The color and background-color properties determine how color is set in CSS.

Before you can learn how to set text and background colors in CSS, you need to know a little bit about color values.

Color values can be specified in several ways:

  • Color Names: There are 17 basic keyword color names that are specified in CSS3. Modern browsers support many additional color names.
    <div style="color: red;">color: red;</div>
  • Hexadecimal Color Values: Hexadecimal color values take the format #rrggbb, where rr is the amount of red in the color, gg is the amount of green in the color, and bb is the amount of blue in the color.
    <div style="color: #ff0000;">color: #ff0000;</div>
  • Short Hexadecimal Color Values: Hexadecimal color values can be abbreviated when a color is represented by three pairs of hexadecimal characters. For example, with #ff6600, you can remove one character from each pair. The shorthand color values take the format #rgb, where r is the amount of red, g is the amount of green in the color, and b is the amount of blue. For example, #f60 is the same as #ff6600.
    selector {
    	color: #f60;
  • Functional Notation: Functional notation takes the format rgb(n,n,n), where n is a number between 0 and 255 or a percentage between 0% and 100% for the red, green, and blue intensities of the color, respectively.
    <div style="color: rgb(255,0,0);">color: rgb(255,0,0);</div>
    	<div style="color: rgb(100%,0%,0%);">color: rgb(100%,0%,0%);</div>
  • RGBA-Format Color Names: The additional (the "a") parameter specifying the opacity (the "alpha" channel) of the color as a decimal between 0.0 (completely transparent) and 1.0 (completely opaque). Thus, the code
    <div style="background-color:
    	rgba(255,0,0,0.5)">
    	color: rgba(255,0,0,0.5)
    	</div>
    would style the div with a red background with 50% transparency.
  • HSL Specification: Supported in modern browsers (Internet Explorer from version 9), HSL is used to specify hue (a degree on the color wheel, with 0=red, 120=green, and 240=blue), saturation (a percentage, with 0% a shade of gray and 100% the full color), and lightness (a percentage, with 0% as black and 100% as white). The following code displays a div with red background:
    <div style="background-color: hsl(0,100%, 50%)"></div>

Our recommendation is to use three-character hexadecimal notation (i.e., #rgb) when you can get the color you want and to use the six-digit hexadecimal notation (i.e., #rrggbb) when you need to define the color more granularly.

Now let's learn how to use these properties in the following steps:

  1. As you have seen in the examples above, the color property is used to set the foreground color of an element. Use the property as shown in this code:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML>
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Color</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    
    <h1>Color</h1>
    
    <div style="color: red;">color: red;</div>
    <div style="color: #ff0000;">color: #ff0000;</div>
    <div style="color: #f00;">color: #f00;</div>
    <div style="color: rgb(255,0,0);">color: rgb(255,0,0);</div>
    <div style="color: rgb(100%,0%,0%);">color: rgb(100%,0%,0%);</div>
    <div style="color: hsl(0,100%, 50%);">color: hsl(0,100%, 50%);</div>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    This code renders the following:Color
  2. Next, you use the background-color property to specify the background color of an element. It can be applied to block elements and inline elements. The syntax looks like this:
    selector {
    background-color: color;}
    Used in HTML, it looks like this:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML>
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Background Color</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <h1>Background Color</h1>
    
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 500px; background-color: #ff0000;">
    	background-color: #ff0000;
    </div>
    
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 500px; background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.5);">
    	background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.5);
    </div>
    
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 500px; background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.1);">
    	background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.1);
    </div>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    This code renders the following:Background Color

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