About Web Safe Colors
Do you write or maintain a hypertext page (known as a web page)? Here's part of what Gary W. Priester wrote in February 2000.
Color for web graphics can get pretty confusing. While there might only be two basic file formats, GIF and JPEG used for web graphics, there are several color systems that apply to GIF images. In this article we'll look at Web Safe or Browser Safe Palettes.
Next month we'll continue exploring GIF palette options and look at Adaptive, WebSnap Adaptive, Uniform and System (Windows and Macintosh) palettes. Well also get a handle on which palettes are best used with which images.
February 21, 2000
What Are Web Safe Colors?
Web Safe, or Browser Safe palettes as they are also referred to, consist of 216 colors that display solid, non-dithered, and consistent on any computer monitor, or web browser, capable of displaying at least 8-bit color (256 colors). The reason why this palette contains only 216 colors, instead of the maximum 256 colors, is that only 216 out of the basic 256 colors will display exactly the same on all computers.
Why is this?
This discrepancy is similar to what happens when a Windows user opens a word processor document created on a Macintosh (or vice versa) and sees a lot of odd characters in place of the expected punctuation marks and other extended characters. While the basic character set of lowercase and upper case characters and numerals map identically on all platforms, each computer platform treats some extended characters, like ampersands, foreign currency symbols, accented characters, and so forth, differently. And so a proper curly quote mark on one computer platform might be a pound sign on another. This happens with colors as well, so what is gray on a Windows monitor, might display pale yellow on a Macintosh browser. In the same way that there are common characters and numbers that are consistent among computer platforms, so there are colors that display the same. These are what we call Web Safe colors.
Full story here from the Web Developers Journal
Gary W. Priester is a reformed advertising art director having spent 25 years creating print and TV advertisements to get people to buy products and services they didn't need. For the past decade, Priester has been a principal in The Black Point Group, a Northern California graphic design firm. He is the author of Looking Good in Color, Ventana Press, and co-author of CorelDRAW Studio Techniques, Osborne/Corel Press. In addition, Gary writes for numerous magazines and Web sites. He lives just north of San Francisco with his artist wife, Mary Carter, their six chickens, five cats, four doves, two finches and one extraordinary canary.
If you'd like to view them in hexadecimal number and colour, have a look at http://www.jessett.com/web_sites/html/hex_colours.shtml
The main page is http://www.jessett.com/
If you're using Mozilla Firefox as a browser like I do, this month you might notice the background of pages are light green. Next month will probably be different.
To do that, insert
<body bgcolor="#ccffcc">
into the hypertext