I lettered trucks, storefronts and church signs for thirty-eight years, and in all that time I never kept more than about a dozen cans of lettering enamel on the shelf. You mix what you need. So when my granddaughter showed me how to make a home page and told me there were sixteen million colors to choose from, I figured I was in for a treat. Then she told me the catch: only 216 of them come out right on everybody's computer. The rest can turn to speckles or wander off to a different shade on a screen that only shows 256 colors, and there are a lot more of those still around than you'd think. (The whole story is on the notes page.)

Well, 216 is a lot more than a dozen. Here they all are, so you can pick by eye instead of by guesswork.

How to read the codes. Each color is three pairs: how much red, how much green, how much blue. Every pair is one of just six amounts:

So FF0000 is all red and nothing else, and 996633 is more red, some green and a little blue, which makes a good saddle brown. Six times six times six is 216. That's the whole trick. If you ever see a code with any other pair in it, like C0C0C0 or 800000, it isn't one of these.

How to use them. Put a number sign in front and use it anywhere HTML takes a color:

Why the gray? You'll notice I put the chart on a middle gray. That's 999999, one of the 216. In the shop we judged color against neutral gray, never against white or black, because white makes every color look darker and black makes every color look like it's glowing. Gray tells you the truth.

The chart is in six plates, one for each amount of red. Down the side, green goes up; across the top, blue goes up.