Are there any good reasons for using hex over decimal for RGB colour values in CSS?

Question

rgb(255,255,255) notation has been available since CSS1. But #ffffff seems to be vastly more popular.

Obviously it\'s slightly more compact

Answer 1

Various things will accept a single hex value where they may have different ways of entering three decimal values. There's also the fact that it's always 6 characters (or 3, admittedly - plus the #) which makes it easier to scan down a list of them.

Just a couple of random thoughts to add to the mix...

Answer 2

HEX is most common due to historical reasons.

Before CSS was common in web development, colors were specified within HTML tags and the most commonly used and supported way to specify a color was to use HEX values.

Answer 3

Hex values are easier to copy and paste from your favourite image editor.

RGB values are easier to manipulate with Javascript.

(My favourite Hex colour value is #EDEDED and a site we made for a client involved in motorsport had a background colour of #F1F1F1 :-)

Ed.

Answer 4

Maybe I've done HTML too long, but I find it easier to think in HEX values. A lot of the pre-defined colour palette for HTML maps neatly to HEX values. Using the shortened format also gives you automatic 'web-safe' colours, though this is not really an issue in the days of 32bit colour displays.

Answer 5

I always used hex, but today I prefer to set my values as:

rgb(82, 110, 188)

in my css files, so whenever I want to add opacity I just need to rename rgb to rgba and add the opacity value. The advantage is that I don't have to convert the hex value to rgb before being able to add the opacity:

rgba(82, 110, 188, 0.5)

Answer 6

It's worth noting that if you want to input an RGBA value, hex notation is not supported; i.e., you can't fake it with #FFFFFFff. As a matter of fact, the alpha value must be a number between 0.0 and 1.0, inclusive. (Check out this page for browser support -- as always, IE is leading the pack here. ;) )

HSL and HSLA color support -- which is very designer friendly -- is also provided with a similar syntax to the RGB() style. If a designer were to use both types of color values in the same stylesheet, they might opt for decimal values over hex codes for consistency.