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I mistakenly thought that too, but it makes sense. Otherwise #fff would expand to #f0f0f0, which is a light gray, but not quite white.

The shorthand pretty much maps a 16-value scale to the same range for each channel, instead of the 256 values.

I think I always knew that it doubled the values, but I only recently realized that #888 isn’t 50%, which would be #808080 (rounded).

Conversely, the shorthand scale does divide into perfect thirds (#555, #AAA) or fifths (#333, #666, #999, #CCC).