I was trying to debug the behavior of a page at work today and running in circles because I couldn’t match a color on the page to a css style. Most of the colors in the stylesheet used a 3 digit hex notation for the color (e.g. color: #346). I couldn’t match these colors to anything on the page or figure out which side of the RGB triplet this value represented (#346000 or #000346). After a serious amount of time with google [1] I learned #346 translates to #334466. Who thought of that? How come nobody told me? I can’t imagine saving 3 bytes per style color definition would decrease page size by any noticeable amount. I suppose it is a pretty good example of lossless compression but that doesn’t seem to be a very good justification. Confused the heck out of me.

[1] What the heck do you search for? “The colors in my browser don’t match the stylesheet”? “Lazy color specification?” “Short color hex css?” Took me awhile to narrow it down.