Web Safe Colors

Hello all,

Something I've had trouble deciding about since I first started playing with
Web design a few years ago is whether I really need to limit myself to
Web-safe colors.  I at first adhered to them religiously, but then I had an
instructor who's a Graphic Designer say to only worry about them for text
and backgrounds and any areas of large flat color.  But I keep thinking that
sometime even that could be considered unnecessary, but when?  Then when I
just posted a site for critiquing, several people said the background should
be a lighter shade of gray, which would mean non-Web-safe.

So below is Kehvan's response to me when I asked him about it privately, and
he's allowing me to post it for discussion.  Does anyone have any thoughts
on this?

Stephanie

*******************************************

Web-safe? What's that? ;-)

I'm kidding of course... I haven't followed the "web-safe" color palette
for... hmm... three? Yeah... THREE years. Why not, you ask? Because I was
looking around at the computers being sold in 1999, both PCs and Macs. In
both cases, I found that these computers bore a default screen resolution of
800x600 or 1024x768 at 16, 24, or 32 bit color depths. 8-bit (256 color) was
therefore pass�. Sure, there were still some users limited to 256, but on
tests on *MY* sites, I found the overwhelming majority used high-res colors
(I used a program called BrowserHawk at the time).

Now, three years later, while I'm sure there are still some 8-bit (max)
display adapters out there somewhere, you'd be hard-pressed to find them,
especially on machines that "real people" will be using for browsing the
web. They might exists in server farms, but who needs high-res color to
monitor the status of x-number of LINUX or NT webservers? I can't think of
any one person's computer I've seen in a very, very long time that didn't
display high-res color. Since the computers are capable of displaying it, I
say we should use it! I also based my decision to stop doing 256 on the fact
that quite a large number of "big" sites use high-res color. If it's okay
for the big companies, why not me? No one has ever complained to me that my
sites were funky, so I guess it's just not an issue for my visitors, and
would further that to being the majority of the web, or the "big" compaines
wouldn't be so bold as to do full-spectrum on their sites.

Is this the right choice for you? I can't answer that. I would take an
educated guess and say you'd be safe going to full-spectrum design, but the
best way to determine would be to get some statistics on the capabilities of
the visitors who come to your sites. BrowserHawk is the only program I know
of that can track display settings, and it's not cheap (which is why I don't
use it anymore). You can try it for 30 days, though, if your webhost will
install it for you... Check out the site at www.cyscape.com. Short of
installing something like that, you COULD dual-design the site and give
people a choice of full-spectrum or 256... Give them full-spectrum first
with a link (not too big, but not hidden, either) that say to click here if
this page's images show odd artifacts or something like that. Or you could
just go full-spectrum and not look back! ;-)

I hope this helps!
Kehvan

HWG: hwg-graphics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA