My Comprehensive Colour Code Page

Here is a quick reference guide of a few colour codes you can use when defining the background, text and link colours in HTML documents.
My Remote Colour Generator allows you to "fine tune" the colour you want. Uses javascript.
The codes are traditionally in hexidecimal form and code for red,green,blue (two digits for each). Think of the colours as #rrggbb. To lighten the blue of a colour, decrease the third pair towards 00, to deepen the red increase the first pair towards ff ...etc etc.
Alternatively, if you spy a great colour from anything displayed on your screen, you can extract any pixel's exact RGB content using OS X's built in Digital Colour Meter (for accuracy and repeatability across different screens and colour profiles remember to set the colour space to display in sRGB). In modern CSS and HTML⁵ you can of course specify the decimal form of a colour directly as rgb(red,green,blue) or you can use an RGB to Hex convertor to get the equivalent hexadecimal format instead.

Colour Names / Codes Table

If you want your pages to validate with an HTML or a CSS validator, W3C has listed only 16 colour names that you can use instead of typing out the hexcodes: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. All platforms and browsers will be able to "translate" these names correctly. However, there are also about 124 extra (making 140 in total) HTML recognised colour names that will still be correctly deciphered if typed "as is" into a tag (e.g. you can type text="aliceblue" instead of text="#F0F8FF" into your coding). I have listed all 140 here along with their corresponding hexadecimal colour codes.
Now, there is a separate issue of "websafe" colours, especially with older browsers and those on other platforms. Despite the code being deciphered correctly, it may not physically display consistently if you're viewing through older 256 colour (8 bit) display systems...so the idea of websafety is to try and get consistent colour across older and newer graphics capabilities. I have included those websafe colours that are the closest match to their HTML names in the third column.
If you wish to use any other colours, you can still do so by specifying their RGB or HEX value as per normal.