A note on the web palette:

The web palette only has 6 shades of 0 saturation color (grey) including
white and black (so that makes white, black, and 4 greys)
The palette also has limitations in other areas, just not as severe
as with the greys.  Because of this, I find it often much more practical
from a quality perspective to actually not bind my images to the web
palette to ensure they look good on older computers.  Instead, I simply do
a 'test' conversion to see how my graphics program displays the image in
the web palette, and if I am satisfied, I save the graphic in the ORIGINAL
form, retaining the quality for higher resolution displays.  If I am
really concerned, I may even open the graphic in a browser set to 256
colors and see how it looks (Ever notice that Photoshop tends to do a
slightly better dithering job than Netscape? ;)  This practice is, of
course, more time-consuming, and I tend to reserve it for personal web
pages or for clients who have a distinct concern for how their page
looks on older machines, but it usually takes no significant time at all
to at least do a quick check against the web palette in Photoshop.

Personally, I have almost stopped worrying about the palette alltogether.
486 computers are extremely inexpensive today, and graphics cards that
can handle at least 65,000 colors are practically being given away.  It's
too bad that many businesses are still stuck with 256 colors, otherwise we
could drop the web palette issue and start worrying about more important
things, like getting PNG more widely accepted and used (I, for one will
not use it until the standard browser jumps from 3.x to 4.x (which is
impossible for many businesses because of speed issues) . Hopefully a
major nationwide upgrade trend will happen soon :)

Pat

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