Are web-safe colours still necessary?

[Julianne]

Just wondering what the general opinion is on only using web-safe colours on a site. Surely most people's monitors these days are capable of showing more than 216 colours (if not, how bad do photos appear on such monitors?!)?

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[viol8ion]

The general consensus is that you don't have to worry about web-safe colors given the state of the current browsers which were the weak link, and not people's monitors. Today's browsers will display colors pretty much as close to average as possible... there being a distinct difference in the way that Macs vs PC's display color. And there is not much one can do about that.

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[philote]

I was wondering this myself the other day. I was just searching for an answer and found a great article:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html?tw=design

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[dakota81]

That article is over three years old already...

 

[philote]

Yeah, the article's a little old, but still good. It did point out something important that you should be aware of. Be careful about having a background with a non-websafe color that's next to an image with the same color in it. It may not display the same in the image as it does in the background (though it may be very close) and can look funny. I ran into this recently when creating a site.

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[ChrisHunt]

Interesting article, would like to see the results of similar tests today.

I think web-safe colours are a lot less important today, though they do make life simpler for amateur designers like me by giving us just 216 colours to choose from instead of 16 million!

That said, I think it makes sense - all other things being equal - to pick from the web safe pallette where possible. It's just that if the web safe pallette doesn't provide a suitable colour, it's not such a big issue nowadays to use an "unsafe" one.

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[cian]

I ran into the same problem as philote mentioned, image on a bg of the same colour. I designed the page at home and it looked different on my PC at work, the difference in the "same colours" was very noticable.
Teaches you to always make the image transparent to hide any differences, that's one way anyway...





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[TruthInSatire]

Here's one. made a flash movie with the background color of the surrounding cell. Not websafe obviously, the two could be destinguished.

http://thereptilian.com/