Color Palette

... Recommend this series to a friend.

The Netscape 216 color web-safe palette is shown below. Click on a square to get the numeric value of the color. 

Color Value:

All right, let's talk a little bit more about color. This is an amazingly complex subject, so I will do my best to keep it simple and to the point.

Remember that the web has evolved. It was not designed and no one person or group put it together. So there are many artifacts left over from the days when the web was much more primitive. And color is very heavy with those artifacts.

Remember just a few years ago a color monitor costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. In those days, just about everyone had black and white monitors and they were all character based. In fact, graphics didn't even exist on the web at all until 1991.

The first color monitors supported just a few colors - eight or sixteen of them. That was all. This lasted for a few years until some advances allowed for 256 colors. And that's the way the industry stayed for a few years.

Now, of course, it's hard to find a monitor which does not support tens of thousands or even millions of colors. But since HTML was put together during those early years, we are stuck with an archaic color system and, worse yet, with supporting the millions of old monitors still in use.

Okay, take a deep breath and let's jump right in. Color on the web is typically represented in RED GREEN BLUE format. You represent the amount of "saturation" of the color using a numeric number between 0 and 255 (00 to FF in hexadecimal format, which is a common way to represent color values).

The smallest value (0) is the least amount of the color and the largest value (255) is the most amount of the color. Thus, to get black  you set RED to 0, GREEN to 0 and BLUE to 0. On the other hand, to get white  you set RED to 255, GREEN to 255 and BLUE to 255. To get anything in between you set the values up or down.

If you do the math, you will find out that this scheme supports over 16.7 million colors! Yet to be safe, you are best limiting yourself to the Windows 256 color set. Actually, to be even safer, you should limit your colors to a set of 216 (this is because Windows reserves some of the color values for itself). If you only use these colors your web pages will work the same on all but the most primitive monitors.