[thelist] web-safe pallette

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Fri Jan 7 09:03:28 CST 2005


Linda R. <lightly at sc.rr.com> wrote:

> By the way, Web safe doesn't mean that anyone using any browser on any 
> Operating System will see those colors in the same way. It means they 
> won't see them as dithered.

Not even that much, if you count operating systems other than Windows 
and Mac. Other OSs made different choices on what palette to use in 
256-colours.

Plus Netscape <=4 on Unix would happily dither and choose the wrong 
colour (at random) for even colours it had palette entries for. 
(Technical explanation: this is because it was crap.)

Web-safe was always overrated. Good riddance to it.

> That means the Web 216 color palette is pretty much guaranteed to dither 
> or shift on a 16-bit color display.

Actually *all* colours are guaranteed to dither/shift on a 15-bit colour 
display. Apart from the primary/secondary colours where each RGB 
component is 0x00 or 0xFF, no colour that can be specified with 5 bits 
per channel can also be specified *exactly* with 8 bits per channel.

On a 16-bit display with 5 bits per channel for red and blue and 6 for 
the green you do get another couple of colours to play with, but not 
much and they're mostly ugly.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/


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