Web Safe Colours

S

(Shovel)

Guest
Quick one:

Are these still relevant? I've been doing a reasonable amount of web dev and I'm finding it a little limited, though I am trying to stick to the palette so far. However, with all computers for the past 3 years+ coming with 16bit+ colours by default, is it "allowed" to use a fuller palette?

I know that different systems/browsers will display different colours differently if given the chance, but is this as "massive" an issue as is claimed? Do you worry about it at all when you code? Do I need to worry about it as much as I do? Or can I indulge in a little freedom?

Cheers.
 
J

Jonty

Guest
Hey Ben

To be honest, most designers dumped websafe colours a while back. As you rightly say, they inhibit designing quite a lot. There are now SVG colour keywords, which broaden the range of 'standard' colours, but to be honest, even these can be fairly limiting (despite the name, they are recognised outside the SVG profile).

Statistics from May 2003 on a sample over ~38Million users breaks down as follows . . .

32bit - 15,644,919 - 47%
16bit - 13,328,154 - 40%
24bit - 2,786,502 - 8%
8bit - 987,237 - 3%
As far as I know, the differences across platforms and browsers can be a lot, but this is often to do with the gamma correction applied by the user's programs and then again by their display settings. Since there's little that can be done about this, you simply have to make the best of a bad situation. Personally, for what's worth, I'd switch away from supporting only 256 colour palettes, or even better, create a fancy default stylesheet, and then create an alternative 256 colour stylesheet which allows the user to decide.

Kind Regards

Jonty

P.S. The adoption of Windows XP has helped the 16bit+ colour cause, as 8bit colour depth is no longer officially supported.
 

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