My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Legacy quirks in HTML color parsing turn arbitrary words like “chucknorris” into valid colors, inspiring playful exploration of other accidental word-as-color mappings and tools that generate them. Commenters use this as a springboard to contrast the web’s famously forgiving, backward-compatible design with calls for stricter standards that might reduce complexity, security risks, and debugging time. Along the way, they touch on performance implications, nostalgic memories of the early web’s experimentation, and related curiosities like named colors, color-guessing games, and the varied names for symbols such as the “octothorpe” (#).

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.”