[thelist] Webmonkey article: Death of Websafe

Steven Wood steve.wood at serviceengine.com
Mon Oct 23 17:12:23 CDT 2000


> http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design
> I just now FINALLY got around to reading this.

Web Design is just waaaay too politically correct.  Let's move on, shall we?
I currently show that 3.43% of my users use a 256 or lower color display.
I'm not going to design my site in order to cater to this 3 percent.

Granted, simpler is almost always better.  So if you can use web safe colors
without any undue design problems... then why not?  But we all know that
this is rarely the case.  I'm almost always going for some sort of "look" or
feel for a site, and if web safe colors won't do... then forget it.  The
same goes for the color blindness issue.  It's a pretty lame argument
overall.  I'm looking to please my average visitor and those with varying
degrees of color blindness, and those using 8-bit displays are not my
average visitor.

And it's not like  sites that don't use web safe colors instantly become
unusable in an 8-bit display, they just look different, or at worst ugly.
I'd venture to say that it is a rare instance when a site actually loses
functionality due to color choice.

Do photographers compose their photographs with color blind people in mind?
Do television programmers and movie producers make movies that cater to
color blind people or people with black and white televisions?  What about
video game developers?  How about painters and artists?  Well, I'd really
like to use the full spectrum with this landscape, but because less than 5%
of my viewers (1 out of every 10 white males) probably have some slight
red-green color blindness, I'm going to keep the contrast sharp and avoid
using certain colors.  Give me a break.

Sorry to bring this up again, but I figured I had to finally say something
about this.  It's bugged me for a long time.

Steven Wood
Dynamic Application Specialist





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