It&#x27;s interesting that the article kind of skipped straight from X11 colors to CSS.  Presumably what happened was that JWZ, who was hacking together the Motif frontend for Mozilla (shortly before they renamed it to Netscape), added &lt;font color=&quot;foo&quot;&gt; and &lt;body background=&quot;bar&quot;&gt; to it, and just handed that string directly to XLookupColor, so that &lt;font color=&quot;red&quot;&gt; would work?  And then whoever was hacking together the Microsoft Windows and MacOS frontends had to copy rgb.txt and &quot;#c0ffee&quot; parsing into the Mozilla code in order to get cross-platform combatibility?  I don&#x27;t know, I wasn&#x27;t there, but to me that&#x27;s the actually interesting juncture.  Up to that point, WWW colors could have been specified in any way whatsoever.  After that, browsers had to be compatible with Mozilla (then Netscape, and then later IE) or people wouldn&#x27;t use them.