WHAT ARE THE WEB SAFE COLORS?

Web safe colors are sets of colors that will not be altered (dithered) when shown on browsers running on a 256-color browser.   These sets of colors are initially selected by Netscape for use on their browsers.

Web safe colors seem to be irrelevant for today’s computers, but back when the web was invented, many people still use graphics card which supports only 256 colors (or less).  In fact, even today, Netscape browsers seems to still have some problems when displaying colors; while Internet Explorer seems to have better color handling.

Of the 256 possible colors, there are 216 that is designated to be web safe colors; they are shown on the table above.   The remaining 32 colors are used by the operating system (such as Windows 95, or MacOS) and are reserved for the color of title bar, desktop, menu bar, etc.

A web color is usually specified as a 6-digits hexadecimal number.  The 6-digits represents the Red Green Blue value of the color, commonly referred as the RGB values.  Even though there are 6 digits on each number, these six digits are actually three separate pairs of numbers, specifically:
The first two digits are the Red (R) value of the color.
The next two digits are the Green (G) value of the color.
The last two digits are the Blue (B) value of the color.
You might attempt to interpret all six digits as a whole, but that will be meaningless.   Instead, you should always break up the six digits into RGB values like this RRGGBB.  So if the hex value is FF6699, then RR=FF, GG=66, BB=99.

HOW TO DETERMINE IF A COLOR IS WEB SAFE

This is actually quite easy.  All you need to do is to break up the RRGGBB values into the RGB components, and make sure each component are multiples of 33 (hexadecimal).  So, to be web safe, the RR, GG, and BB values must be one of these numbers:

Hexadecimal:      00  33  66  99  CC FF

So, for example: 0033CC is web safe (because RR=00 which is a multiple of 33; GG=33, which is a multiple of 33; and BB=99, which is also a multiple of 33)

If you use web safe colors, The quality of your design ideas will improve and your Web page will look the same on monitors that can display 256 colors or more, on both Macintosh and PC computers.

no matter which computer monitor or which browser is used to open the web site. Any system capable of displaying an 8 bit color system will be able to display a site.

For more examples regarding Logos & other templates you can check with www.ipott.info.

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courtesy:http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/websafecolor/index.html