Web safe colour?
What is it and do you care?
There's a lot of obsessing done about using Web Safe Colour and not too much done to actually explain it or help you work out whether or not it's important on your site. So here's what you need to know.
In the old days computers didn't come with ace graphics cards as standard - if you were lucky enough to have colour you'd probably be limited to a mere 256 of them and those 256 would be controlled by the operating system of the computer.
This caused problems if you were designing web pages that would be seen on different operating systems, especially pages that needed to look the same on both Macs and PCs.
The trouble was that both OS's used different sets of colours from each other - and that only 216 of these colours match up with each other.
Web Safe or not?
The colours which match up cross-platform are the Web Safe Colours. Every web graphics and authoring tool provides lots of support for them - in many cases limiting your choice of colours exclusivly to the web safe pallette. Nearly every published book on web design seems to insist that the web safe pallette is used.
To hear what folk have to say on the subject you'd think that nobody had bought a new computer/monitor/graphics card in the last five years. 'Cos every single one of those new computers is capable of displaying millions of colours. So maybe you don't need to to worry about staying Web Safe!
The only people who do need to think about them are people designing for ancient legacy kit. You know your sites demographic - you make the decison.
Even the W3C approved CSS 1 spec allows you to specify any old colour you like, either though named colours, or by entering the Hex values of the colour you're after.
You can find out a colours hex value using most graphics editors. Photoshop and Fireworks both let you see Hex values as you pick colours.
It was all a lie anyway!
What's more here's some final irony - it seems that the Web Safe Colours were never safe anyway and in fact, rather than 216 or 'em there were only 6 or something. I bookmarked the article to save it for the world but the swine at A List Apart have moved it. Nevertheless take it from me, unless you think your sites visitors are going to be using old out dated equipment, you can leave the Web Safe colours behind.
Aha! Check it out! The article was on Webmonkey all along. Top article on web safe colours...