What are these self-styled ‘Web Safe’ colours. Do you need them? Should you care?
10 million years ago when the DTPosaurs worked on huge, slow computers with tiny, tiny little screens, there wasn’t a lot of anything to go round, not enough RAM, not disk space, not enough colours.
That’s why when the web came along it was important for designers to recognise that not everyone’s monitor could display the same colours. At that time the fanciest graphics cards where maybe putting out 16bit colours (that’s 65536 different colours) but your average punter would of probably owned a 8bit card (that’s only 256 colours folks!)
To make things more confusing both the Mac’s system palette and Window’s system palette were different from each other…(A system palette is the collection of colours that an operating system uses to create it’s icons, menus, windows, etc). Both systems used an 8bit Palette but the colours they used weren’t exactly the same as each other – in fact the Windows and Mac system palettes only shared 216 colours with each other. This meant that sometimes colours in images changed as they moved between one platform and the other.
To avoid this web designers started to refer to the ‘Web Safe’ colours, which is the subset of 216 colours that worked predictably on both the Mac and Windows OS. Over time this became a recognised concept and software houses started to build support into applications that would help designers choose only from the Web Safe set.
More time passed and the 3D games revolution forced the technology in graphics cards further and further forward until there came a time when you’d be very hard pressed to even buy a new 16bit graphics card let alone a 8bit one. The major OS’s use whatever colours they want from massive 24bit+ palette. The world changed.
Yet still the idea of Web Safe colours persists in software packages that should know better.
So, web designers, when you’re in Photoshop and you’re using the Colour Picker – ignore the checkbox that says ‘Only Web Colours’ – all is does is cut down your choices.
Also,when picking colours in Dreamweaver using the Dreamweaver Colour Picker – remember that you’re not limited to the colours on the main area of the colour picker. If you want to select colours not included in the ‘web safe’ category look for the small circle icon just towards the top right of the colour picker.
Last. It turns out that the ‘web safe’ colours were never safe in the first place. Check it out.