DEV Community: Dale Stubbart

Filtering on First Letter

Dale Stubbart — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:26:03 +0000

Yesterday, I added a first letter filter to my Many Colors Website. https://stubbart.com/computer_consulting/color_themes/color_all.html
Easy enough, right? Just provide a drop-down box of each letter. Then, see if the first letter of the color name matches. Zip! Done!
Last night while I was sleeping, my mind reminded me that some of these colors have multiple names. That's the way they are in the Palettes. For instance there's a color that's called both Storm and Rhino within the same Palette.
The colors with all there info are stored in a 2D Array. So, I added four more columns for other first letters. I just guessed at 4 as a maximum number, that seemed to work for other color attributes. And, it worked.
So, I manually went through and added those letters. Sure, I could have copied the array to another script and checked for all capital letters in a name and then output that. But, this is vanilla javascript - I/O is limited at best. Still, I could have copied it to Excel and Word to do that, perhaps employ some VBA.
Anyway, it's only 1000 colors. It would take me as long to do that s it would to go through it manually.
It's a good thing I did this manually. GarbanzoBean Yellow. To me, GarbanzoBean is one word. I don't really want to add this to the B's. If you're looking Bean colors, you can filter on Food. Or you can do Control+F and find Bean. Also, I enclose some color names in s to add tips (s). So, the first letter is not first. This got to be something that needed some human intuition / judgment. Yes, I want to help people find color names. I don't want to return inappropriate results.
Color your World Many and Various!

Closest Official Color page Enhancements

Dale Stubbart — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:17:02 +0000

https://stubbart.com/computer_consulting/color_themes/color_closest.html
This is my webpage to find the closest official color to any color. Yet, it does much more. It now shows you that color if it were black, white, or gray. It shows you the desaturated version of that color. It shows what that color would look like if you add red, green, blue, etc. And, it shows you contrasting colors including the negative color.
A lot of that is made possible by my xs_color_convert function in my xs_style.js library. xs_color_convert(fromcolor,tocolor_type). tocolor_type can be hex, rgb, hsv, hsl, hue, lum (for luminance), and now dst for desaturate, gry for gray, gy~ for grayish, wh~ for whiteish, bk~ for blackish, or a 3 digit number consisting of ones and zeros. This 3 digit number represents what rgb (red,green,blue) colors you want to add: 100 is red, 110 is yellow, 111 is white, etc.

Contrasting Color

Dale Stubbart — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:13:14 +0000

javascript hashtag#colors

I searched for an easy way fo find the best contrasting color for colors on my website.
There's contrast-color in css, but only works in Firefox and Safari.
There are other options with limited availability.
I didn't see any formula's I liked.
Google Search AI offered steps. I'm hesitant to use anything AI offers without another source where I can verify it. The steps were written differently enough, that it took my brain a few minutes to understand what each one was saying and how they could/would work together.
In my xs_style.js library which would be open source, but I'm the only one maintaining it, I used those steps to build xs_color_contrast_enhanced. It allows you to contrast with the best of 2, 3, or 4 colors. It also allows you to contrast with the best of any number of colors - just pass them in an array. Yes, it can do 16777216 colors, which is the max # colors available on a website. But, you're array of colors should probably be much smaller for performance sake.
xs_style.js contains xs_color_rainbow_array and that worked best for contrast.
However, there were still a few colors on my Many Colors page where the contrast/text color was off - see link at bottom of post. There, I display about 1000 colors. There's another array which also has white and black, besides rainbow colors. That one was further off. Mostly some greens should have had white/light text and some reds should have had black/dark text. I added a couple of arrays to that webpage so that I could overwrite the contrasting colors that were visually off. Until I get a contrast formula that's closer, this will have to do. Only 114 were off. Not bad. Perhaps, I could have checked the hue colors to see if they were red or green. But, that would have corrected too many incorrectly. And there were more colors where the contrasting color was off.
I thought that if I evenly spaced the colors throughout the possibilities, that might work. Maybe it would if they were evenly spaced by luminosity, but by hex value it didn't help.
Still, since it would be close in most situations, I added it to my webpage where you can input a color and find out the closest official colors. You can also find that page at the following link.
https://stubbart.com/computer_consulting/color_themes/color_all.html
If you know of better ways to find the contrasting color, please let me know. And, always feel free to ask questions.