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There are 16.7 million possible colors you can select for HTML page backgrounds, table backgrounds and font colors. Of these 16.7 million only 216 are considered "Web Safe" colors that will display the same way on a wide variety of old and new Windows & Macintosh computer monitors. Many of the other 16.7 million will display properly too. However, if you select a color that is not "web safe" different monitors may display the same color differently. In practice this means that that lovely, rich tropical green you selected for a page background on your computer may turn out to be an ugly dark olive green when viewed on another person's monitor.
There are three strategies you can follow to ensure that the color you have selected works on a broad range of monitors and browser versions.
- Select a color from the 216 color safe palate below and code it into your web page.
- Upload the page to your web server and view it to verify color accuracy.
- The color safe issue is becoming less and less of an issue as people upgrade from older monitors to newer ones. As of 2003, it is generally safe to select a hex code for a color outside of this 216 palette. You can find hex codes for other colors in books like HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro. You can also select a color in Photoshop or other graphics programs and determine the hex code for that color. Please refer to your graphic's program's documentation regarding how to do this.
- After coding a color into your web page check out the color live on the web. Using FTP or another method upload your page to the web server that serves the page over the Internet. Go to a few different computers and look at the page. If the color looks good on a variety of machines, you can feel reasonably safe the colors will work on most users computers. The exceptions will be on older computers and monitors that may have low quality video cards connected to low quality display monitors.
Copyright 1997, 2004 John Sedgwick
All Rights Reserved
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