[thelist] Gradient CSS and IE 4+

Paola Kathuria paola at limitless.co.uk
Wed Jul 25 05:56:51 CDT 2001


Sam-I-Am wrote:
> Stick with a websafe color if you can - I'm seeing differences in
> color between a background image and bgcolor - even though they are
> specd at the same rgb.

It's possible that you're seeing this effect with web "safe"
colours if you're using Netscape on a 16-bit monitor (or, possibly,
15-bit).

It's because most of the 216 "safe" colours cannot be represented
exactly in 16-bit colour.  Browsers shifts (not dithers) colours to
the nearest displaying colour - but Netscape gets it wrong and
shifts bgcolor and image colours in different directions, thus
showing the mismatch when an image is on top of bgcolor of the same
RGB colour.  A workaround is to make images transparent on their
background colour.

The WebMonkey's article "Death of the Websafe Color Palette? 
(http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design)
was about this.  I've also written about it at on my colour
resource at http://www.limitless.co.uk/colour/tips.lml#transparent

It's another reason I think people should relax their grip on the
216 "safe" palette - more people have 16-bit monitors than 8-bit
(256 cols) monitors.


Paola




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