Text Colors

Most coloured text is styling: a blue heading, a brand-coloured lead paragraph, a page printed in one colour. The words are kept and the colour is not rendered.

Colour becomes content when it is the only thing distinguishing some text from the rest — an insertion printed in red with no underline, a figure in red meaning negative, a status word whose colour is the status. There the colour MUST be carried:

… will testify. <font color="red">Before or promptly after the notice or subpoena is served …</font> A subpoena …

• The element wraps exactly the coloured words, so the output says which text carries the colour.
• The colour MUST be the nearest HTML colour name — not a hex value and not an invented label.
• Text whose colour is doubled by another mark — red and underlined, red and bold — is already distinguished; the colour is decoration there and is not carried.

A cell that is a coloured fill with no text at all — a risk-matrix square, a heat-map grid — becomes an empty cell if the colour is dropped, and the whole table stops meaning anything. See Color as the Value (§9.6.4) for that situation specifically.

Highlighting already has a settled encoding built on the same vocabulary:

<mark style="background-color: HTML_COLOR_NAME">…</mark>

Text colour uses the nearest HTML colour name too, so there is one colour vocabulary for both: <mark style="background-color: NAME"> for a highlight, <font color="NAME"> for coloured text.