Web-safe colors

Modern PCs and Macs come with some reasonable graphics clout, but this wasn’t always
the case. In fact, many computers still in common use cannot display millions of colors.
Back in the 1990s, palette restrictions were even more ferocious, with many computers
limited to a paltry 256 colors (8-bit). Microsoft and Apple couldn’t agree on which colors
to use, hence the creation of the web-safe palette, which comprises just 216 colors that
are supposed to work accurately on both platforms without dithering. (For more information
about dithering, see the “GIF” section later in this chapter.) Applications such as
Photoshop have built-in web-safe palettes, and variations on the palette can be seen at
www.visibone.com.
Colors in the web-safe palette are made up of combinations of RGB in 20% increments,
and as you might expect, the palette is limited. Also discouraging, in the article “Death of
the Websafe Color Palette?” on Webmonkey (www.webmonkey.com/00/37/index2a.html;
posted September 6, 2000), David Lehn and Hadley Stern reported that all but 22 of these
colors were incorrectly shifted in some way when tested on a variety of platforms and
color displays—in other words, only 22 of the web-safe colors are actually totally
web-safe.
While the rise of PDAs means that the web-safe palette may make a comeback in specialist
circles (although PDAs and even cell phones are increasingly powerful when it comes to
graphics), most designers these days ignore it. The majority of people using the Web have
displays capable of millions of colors, and almost everyone else can view at leastthousands of colors. Unless you’re designing for a very specific audience with known
restricted hardware, stick with sRGB (the default color space of the Web—see
www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB) and design in millions of colors. And consider yourself
lucky that it’s not 1995.