title: Why are colors represented by hexadecimal values in CSS? Is there an historical explanation?
body: <p>In some programming languages, colors are represented by hexadecimal values.  For example, using CSS, to change the text color of a header to maroon-ish, you could type:</p>
  
  <pre><code>h1 {
  color: #8B1C62;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm wondering what the reason is for using a base-16 numeral system to represent colors.  You could hypothetically use any numeral system to represent the same values, no?</p>
  
  <p>When did this convention start?  Does anybody know where I can read about the history of this phenomenon?</p>