Web Safe Colours

[Smokie]

Anyone still using web safe colours? Our designers have been doing websites using non-web safe colours for a while now, just wondering what everyone else is doing? ...still web safe?

Cheers

[Webforumz Staff]

Very few people still use web safe colours. Web users seem to be identifying web links less by their colour and more by the fact that they are underlined, the mouse changes to a hand when you move over them and that they are usually grouped with other links in an easy found area.

[Smokie]

whats that got to do with web safe colours?!

[Webforumz Staff]

Well the default link colours are web safe, lol....

People haven't been following websafe colours in images for years. It's accepted that people have monitors capable of showing at least 16-bit colours. A few people still hang onto the default link colours, though.

[Smokie]

oh sorry i see what you mean now!

I thought it was ok to use non-web safe colours and you have confirmed that so thanks!

[Rob]

whats a web safe color?

You mean one of the 16.7 million possible colors??

I guess the term 'web safe color' needs to be binned.

LMAO. I totaly agree. What are web safe colors!? I haven't for a few years now. I do still try and keep at 800x600 even though I use 1600x1400.

[Rob]

erm....

what has your screen res gotta do with color Stephen??

LMAO

[courtjester]

Ok, now this is actually my field here. WOhooo. lol. Yeah... right. But anyways, I use all websafe colors to do my artwork on the pc. I have been trying to put crap together lately to save time, but as I have been told continuosly it isn't the right idea. So, I guess I will go back to the hours upon hours of editing things. But I wanted to know something about this, is it ok to use bitmaps as pictures on the internet? I mean, I usually use GIFs from photoshop with a web safe pallete, but can you use bitmaps?

[D3mon]

You can use bitmaps, but they tend to be so large that they are prohibitive.

[Webforumz Staff]

Use a JPEG instead, as it compresses quite alot and is still technically bitmap.

:mad:ROB! It doesn't.

[gwx03]

i believe i read somewhere in a dreamweaver book i purchased a year or so back that the websafe colours are the 256 colours... anyway, most ( i think above 90percent )PC users don't use 256 anymore, so it doesn't really matter.....

[D3mon]

Here the web-safe palette:
http://www.visibone.com/color/poster4x.html

To test your site, drop you desktop color level down to 256 colors.

[courtjester]

Ok, I have the final answer on this one. Depending on what you are putting on the internet determines if you should use web-safe. I have drawings that were over 1 MB for the JPEG, but if you make them websafe they are a whole lot smaller. SO, if you need it for the space than go websafe, or if the download time is over 15 secs, then use websafe, otherwise, go ahead and use something better!

[Webforumz Staff]

Not neccessarily kulegamr! On a 500k/sec broadband connection, 1 meg will take 20 seconds. That isn't all that long to be honest - And that's for a very big image.

Websafe colours are, in my opinion, a bad idea. Not only are most of the colours garish, but you are very limited in the pallete.

If your image is too big as a JPEG, but doesn't contain many different colours itself, try a GIF. They contain only 256 colours, but the GIF image has it's own pallete, based on the colours in the image - Not a standard pallete. So even if your image has colours that are not websafe, they will still go into this pallete and the image will be MUCH smaller than the JPEG. Of course if your image has many, many different colours then they will not fit into the pallete!

[CactusJack]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="geneva, verdana, arial" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by gwx03

i believe i read somewhere in a dreamweaver book i purchased a year or so back that the websafe colours are the 256 colours... anyway, most ( i think above 90percent )PC users don't use 256 anymore, so it doesn't really matter.....
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Actually the websafe palette is 216 colours. It started out in the good old days as a palette of the colours that worked the same on netscape as IE I think, or was it macs and PCs. Anyway they are colours that work on lots of browsers without dithering, ie that annoying dotty affect used to similute colours the PC didn't support natively... only an issue if you viewed in 256 colours.

Nowadays everyone views in 16 megafookzillian colours so its not an issue any more really.

[Webforumz Staff]

It was 216 web safe colours, but it's 256 colours in a GIF, which is where the misunderstanding comes from.