Outlaw colors? Safe colors? IE6 & Netscape?

[jlockley]

Choosing from the colors apparently safe, I don't find what I need (here some hues which will /would work)

http://www.wtv-zone.com/spacemany/dmo/65.html

(very nifty gizmo - starting point here

http://www.wtv-zone.com/spacemany/dmo/colorwindows.html

).

I have a couple of colors that came with the basic form a friend in Germany put together for me which send up warnings on checking the pages, but they seem to work in both Mozilla and IE7.

Dithering, I understand, is a bad thing, but how bad? Are the 256 or so "safe colors" really an absolute necessary, or can you dare to step outside the box?

Another question. IE6 and earlier versions, Netscape, etc: I know the hacks but haven't got to them yet. (In theory, at least). Are there still a lot of IE6 & earlier, netscape users out there, and how long will they need to be considered as a group with web pages?

 

[vacunita]

What kind of warnings?

Dithering refers to transparencies in images, like GIF so I'm not sure how it applies to web safe colors.

As for IE6 and Netscape: Netscape is basically out of the picture now. so not really worth it to support it.

IE6 on the other hand still takes up a large chunk of web users. IE7 is slowly creeping up, and IE8 is now being released as a beta for web developer testing. So you may want to check it out over at the Microsoft site.

Here's a page with reliable usage statistics for browsers.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
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[johnwm]

Dithering and web-safe colours ceased to be a problem when the world started using 24/32 bit video cards. As long as you specify your colours in hex format they will render fine, subject to hardware differences on individual machines.

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[jlockley]

That's what I was hoping to hear. Reading up on the question I have noticed a number of warnings emphasizing "web safe colors", which appear to refer to primarily to netscape. One of the statements was that web safe colors don't dither, which seems really stupid to me, since that would leave you theoretically with three plus black and white, really.

As for the IE6, it's off to work I go, I guess.

Thank you.

 

[Sheco]

Back in the old days some people had computers that were only capable of displaying 256 colors.

But the range of 000000 to FFFFFF is 16,777,216 colors.

In the old days if you used colors outside the baseline 256 then the low-end machines would need substitute your chosen color with the nearest match within the 256. Sometimes this would come out looking like poo. Think of how windows looks when you run in Safe Mode.

Since basically nobody uses a 256 color machine these days you don't really have to worry about it.

 

[traingamer]

Close.
In the old days, machines capable of only 256 colors would mix (or dither) those colors to produce colors outside the 216 web-safe colors. See Dithering Explained among other sources.

Greg
"Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." - Winston Churchill

 

[jlockley]

I am happy. Ever an outlaw, I guess. I suspected as much, but thanks. Some validation tools I was using (don't remember which) groaned at the colors.
I suspect there are some who will groan at mine.

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