There are 16 "original" color names as follows:

1. aqua
2. black
3. blue
4. fuchsia
5. gray
6. green
7. lime
8. maroon
9. navy
10. olive
11. purple
12. red
13. silver
14. teal
15. white
16. yellow

Now here is a little table demonstrating the colors:

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RGB Color Chart

This is my own chart of the original 216 browser safe colors. Click the link on the color you're interested in to get a "blow up" of the color.

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Check this out:

Welcome to the Hex Hub (Named Hexadecimal Color Codes for HTML)

Here you will see a much wider choice of colors. Browsers have become much more standardized since the early days of "browser safe colors"; I've had good results using the Hex Hub pages for my own work.

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I got this from here:

http://www.webbedenvironments.com/v02/02_31.html

You'll note that it's an old page, 1999; there will be newer fonts out there, but these are guaranteed (as much as you can guarantee anything involving browsers) to render predictably across older browsers.

Most of these don't render on my PC--only Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, Symbol.

Here I'm getting better results. Everything renders (in Netscape 4.51).

I'm getting Arial black, Comic Sans MS, Impact, Verdana, Webdings.

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Just when you got used to using <font> tags, now you are not supposed to use them anymore.

Why not? More and more, the move is toward using CSS (see Style Sheets for the Weary). Style sheets are a good idea; they're not new, but only recently have browsers begun to render them uniformly (or at least reasonably so).

Figuring out font families is not a big deal. It is not too different from listing several face faces. You put a font you think will render on Windows, one for Mac, and one that has to render no matter what, as follows:

Note that putting spaces between the font family names is optional. Separate the names with commas.

Also, you will need to enclose any font family name that has spaces inside it, such as Times New Roman, with quotation marks. If you're using double quotation marks for your tags, use single quotation marks to enclose the font family name. If you're using single quotation marks for your tags, use double quotation marks to enclose the font family name.

Tooling around on the Web, you can find many different font family names. Some of them will render on some browsers, some won't. Again it is a matter of experimenting and compromise.

Let's have a little fun finding some font families and see if they render.

Here is a link that I found helpful: CSS and font-family. From that source:

<span style="font-family:Garamond,Palatino,serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'arial black',helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'book antiqua',geneva,serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'comic sans ms',helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'courier new',courier,monospace; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:impact,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'news gothic mt',helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:tahoma,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:'times new roman',times,serif; font-size:16pt">

<span style="font-family:verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:16pt">

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This type of information changes fairly frequently, so there are two easy ways to handle it. One is to just do "View Source" on a page you come across on the Web that you like. Check out the color name/hex code/font face/what have you, and use that.

The other way is to jump on Google and do a quick search for "html fonts" "browser safe fonts" "browser safe colors" "html colors" etc.

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