The property colordoes not apply to fonts or text property categories. It actually lives in its own specification section, CSS1 and CSS2.1 . There is even a whole CSS3 module dedicated to color.
Each specification is referred to coloras defining the foreground color, and then describes it as referring to the color of the text content of the element. But since it foreground-colorwill be too detailed, the word "foreground" will not contain the name of the property. background-coloris self-evident and differs from color.
However, while a property colorusually affects the text of an element, if you also specify a border, but do not specify border-color, the border will have the same color as the text. This is perfectly normal, as the CSS model specification states :
If the border color of an element is not set using the border property, user agents should use the value of the element's color property as the calculated value for the border color.
<div style="color: red; border: 1px dotted">
This block has red text and a red 1-pixel dotted border.
Notice only the width and style are specified in the style attribute.
</div>
.