Colors and Counters

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COLORS	COLOR TABLE	AT&T COUNTER
BYTES AND HEX	AASPACE.GIF	HEX TO DECIMAL


OUR HOME PAGE		OUR LINK PAGE

COLORS

Colors on the web are generally determined by the Red Green Blue (RGB) coloring scheme. When you look at the html coding for this page's background, <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFCC">, it simply means that the amount of red is maximized at hex FF, green at hex FF, and blue is set at hex CC, about 80 percent intensity, resulting in pale yellow.

Color values run from 00 through FF. '000000' denotes the absence of any color and renders black. 'FFFFFF' denotes all colors and renders white. In hexadecimal, 'FF' equals decimal 255. The inclusion of '00' gives you the possibility of 256 colors per byte. The maximum possible number of colors then is 256 X 256 X 256 or 16,777,216.

Is selecting the right background, text, and link colors taking too long? Click here.

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BYTES AND HEX

Bytes are the building blocks for computer software. They consist of 8 bits and are displayed like this -
0000 0000 has a value of '00' and 1111 1111 has a value of 'FF'.

How are these values arrived at?

The hexadecimal system (base sixteen) has values 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D F. Unlike decimal, in hex when you add 1 to 9 you get A and nothing to carry. It's not until you add 1 to F that you replace the F with a zero and carry 1 -
Decimal - 1 + 9 = 10. Hex - 1 + 9 = A + 1 = B + 1 = C + 1 = D + 1 = E + 1 = F + 1 = 10.

The following are 'binary representations' of hex values. When a bit is '0', it's 'off'. When it's '1' it's 'on'. Every time a 1 is shifted a position to the left, it's value doubles. So let's look at a byte. Bit positions are numbered right to left as shown here - 8765 4321

A bit turned on in position 1 = 1, position 2 = 2, position 3 = 4, position 4 = 8. If all the bits are turned on (1111), you have 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 which equals 15, or hex '0F' as shown in this addition -

0000 0001 + (1)
0000 0010 + (2)
0000 0100 + (4)
0000 1000 + (8)
-----------------------
0000 1111 = (15)

As decimal is base ten and hexadecimal is base sixteen, binary is base two. When you add a 1 to a 1 you replace the 1 with a zero and carry the 1 - 0001 + 0001 = 0010. In other words, every time 1 is added to a 1 the value is doubled by causing a carry, or 'shift', to the left.

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THE AT&T COUNTER

The AT&T counter on your page is a piece of cgi code. The count itself is kept up at the server. When you code it, don't expect it to show up in your editor or your browser preview. It is coded as follows, where 'fg' is foreground and 'bg' is background -

<img src="/cgi-bin/counter.gif?fg=nn,nn,nn&bg=nn,nn,nn">

Unlike the coding for background, text, and link colors, which are in hex, this code wants the colors coded in decimal. So let's say we want the counter numbers to be the same color as this background and the counter background to be blue like the text. You take the BGCOLOR (see above) 'FFFFCC' and split it up -
'FF FF CC'. FF equals 255 in decimal and CC equals in 204 decimal (see hexadecimal to decimal conversion, below). The text color is '0000FF' which becomes '00 00 255'. So the coding is -

<IMG SRC="/cgi-bin/counter.gif?fg=255,255,204&bg=0,0,255">

which will give you pale yellow numerals on a blue background.

Here is the resulting counter -

<IMG SRC="/cgi-bin/counter.gif?fg=0,0,255">

will give you blue numerals on a transparent background.

Specifying 'WIDTH=5 HEIGHT=5' (sans quotes) will give you a 'hidden' counter. It will appear as a very small dimple on your page.

For more info on coding counters, click here. Note: AT&T PWP signon required.

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HEXADECIMAL TO DECIMAL CONVERSION

HEX

DEC

HEX

DEC

HEX

DEC

HEX

DEC

00

0

00

0

80

128

08

8

10

16

01

1

90

144

09

9

20

32

02

2

A0

160

0A

10

30

48

03

3

B0

176

0B

11

40

64

04

4

C0

192

0C

12

50

80

05

5

D0

208

0D

13

60

96

06

6

E0

224

0E

14

70

112

07

7

F0

240

0F

15

In the counter example above I said that hex 'CC' equaled decimal 204. To arrive at that
figure you take the value of 'C0' (192) and add it to the value of '0C' (12) which results in 204.

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AASPACE.GIF

Pointer for Spike

Apropos of nothing I decided to add 'aaspace.gif' to this page. It's a transparent gif you can insert as 'padding' for your page to position an item. Here it has a border so you can right click and save it. Add it to your page and play with width and height to accomplish your purpose.

Pointer for Spike Pointer for Spike

Pointer for Spike

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