My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Quirky HTML Color Parsing & Word-Colors

  • Many comments explore how HTML’s legacy color attribute turns arbitrary words into colors via hex-like parsing (e.g., “crap”, “watermelon”, “plant”, “smurf”, “coffee” → #c0ffee).
  • People share similar novelty tools and games: word-to-color mappers, color guessing games, and an app that finds a word matching a chosen color.
  • Some enjoy semi-semantic coincidences (e.g., “chocolate” → #c0c0a0 ≈ “cocoa”) and the idea of using your own name as a “personal color.”

HTML vs CSS Behavior

  • Clarification that these word-colors work for HTML’s color attribute but not for CSS color properties.
  • HTML5 standardized many old quirks; HTML and CSS now have clearly defined but different color parsing rules.
  • Examples: rgb(300, -50, 1000) is clamped in CSS; an 8-digit hex like #fe11a710 is treated as RGB in HTML but includes alpha in CSS.

Forgiving Web vs Strict Web

  • One side praises the web’s forgiving nature: resilience, backward compatibility (e.g., 1990s sites still rendering), and low barrier to entry for creativity and learning.
  • Others criticize leniency: more complex specs, harder debugging, unexpected behavior, and doubts about suitability for “mission critical” tasks.
  • Some link complexity and forgiving parsing to security issues; others argue most vulnerabilities stem from overall complexity, not forgiveness per se.
  • XHTML is cited as a failed attempt at stricter, fail-fast behavior; some think its strictness was right, others say it was too brittle for real-world use.

Performance & Parsing Overhead

  • Concerns about computational overhead of complex parsing are largely dismissed as negligible compared to modern web bottlenecks (JS, layout, network).
  • A CSS parser engineer notes error-handling cost is small and usually on an easily predicted “happy path.”

Terminology & Symbol Names

  • Tangent on the # symbol’s names: “octothorpe,” “hash,” “pound,” and how “hashtag” emerged.
  • Discussion of regional keyboard differences and names for {}, [], etc.

Commercialization & Old Content

  • Some see the article as repackaging a well-known Stack Overflow answer, framing it as part of SEO/marketing trends.
  • Debate on whether missing web micropayments are to blame for value capture, with skepticism that micropayments would have prevented today’s ad-driven “enshittification.”