3rd note:

The attribute bgcolor for [tr], [td] and [th] allows to specify color values. Allowed options are either color words (though I'm not sure which are possible - I would assume that the same selection as for the font color is possible) and hex-values (like "#ff0000" for red).
HTML colour names are specified here. There are 17 "safe" colours and 123 less safe colours (which might display differently in different browsers, or not at all).

However, I recommend using the hex value in all cases for better accuracy (and completely forgo using the names).