Posted by rf on 10/18/08 11:29

Steve Pugh wrote:

> Anyway, web safe colours were never as important as most people think.
> Not for text/backgrounds anyway. So long as there's strong contrast
> between the foreground and background then even if the colours get
> shifted a little the text will still be readable.

True.

> The web safe palette
> was slightly more important when creating GIFs but I still wouldn't
> worry about it any more.

The "web safe" palette was *considerably* more important for gifs.

Display two gifs on a page, neither of which use the "safe" palette.

The first gif fills the palette with its colours.

The second gifs colours cannot fit the palette. The GUI has to use the
nearest colours that are there.

This might result in, for example, #bbbbbb being mapped to #ccaacc. The two
colours, while not too different numerically (and a reasonably close and
lucky "guess" buy the rasteriser) are *significantly* different visually.
Your stormy grey sky is suddenly a late evening sunset.

More often #bbbbbb would be mapped to something like #cc2222.

Jpegs simply do not work with an 8 bit palette, even by themselves.

Of interest is that only two (#000 and #fff) of the "web safe" colours can
be displayed accurately by a 15 or 16 bit graphics card. Safe? :-)

However all of this is, in the computer field, ancient history and can
safely ignored.

--
Cheers
Richard.

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