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Learning HTML & HTML Editors
Learning HTML & HTML Editors by Kalina of Affordable Web Design
I hold a firm belief that all webmasters should practice validating their code, so all advice I give in this site will be centered around that belief.
If you'd like to...
DHTML-Introduction
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Your Site Map: Spider Food Or Just A Light Snack?
Mechanical spiders have to eat. In fact, they usually have bigger appetites than the real-life spiders you squish under your shoe. What spiders am I talking about? The automated programs sent out by search engines to review and index websites. These...
Web Design for the No-Talent Artist
Not everyone can hit a 90 mile per hour fast ball 400 feet. That's why there are so few major league baseball players. Most everyone enjoyed art class while in school, but we also realized there was probably only one in each classroom who actually...
The Top 5 Roadblocks To Web Accessibility
Introduction Accessibility is often the last thing on a web designer's mind when creating a website. This is not a trait unique to newbies or people working on a personal page. It is also a trait common to professional web designers (large...
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Making Sense of Web Colors
In 1994, Netscape defined 216 colors that have priority in
browsers based on the 256 colors displayed by an 8-bit system.
40 colors display differently between PCs and MACs and are
therefore eliminated.
These 216 fixed colors, known as web safe colors are universally
recognized by all browsers and operating systems. This means
that web pages which use only these colors have a better chance
of looking the same on any browser.
Less than 5% of computer systems are currently using 8-bit
systems and are thus confined to 256 colors. However, you should
still use web safe colors as a starting point, especially for
logos, flat color illustrations, backgrounds, and large areas of
the same color in any image.
Colors are made up of 3 pairs of hexadecimal digits. Each pair
represents a value from 3 root colors: red, green, and blue
usually represented as RGB.
Hexadecimal is based on 16 digits not 10. So, A would be
equivalent to 11, B to 12, and so on. For example, 000000 is
black, FFFFFF is white and FF0000 is red. The first pair of
numbers shows the amount of red, the second set shows how much
green and the last set shows how much blue is used to obtain
that particular color. 00 represents no amount of that color
(0%) while FF is the most amount of any color you can use
(100%).
Here's the percentage breakdown: 0%=00, 20%=33, 40%=66, 60%=99,
80%=CC, 100%=FF.
Web safe colors, which are made up of 3 pairs of identical
hexadecimal digits, consist of every combination of 00, 33, 66,
99, CC, and FF for each root color (6 x 6 x 6 = 216).
Todays computers are no longer limited to the 256 colors
displayed by 8-bit video cards. 16-bit cards display 4096 colors
(referred to as web smart colors) while, 32-bit cards will
display millions of different colors (referred to as unsafe
colors). The total number of possible colors is over 16 million
as each root color can be
one of 256 values (256 x 256 x 256 =
16,777,216). Your browser can display any of these colors as
long as your video card will support it.
There are many color wheels and charts available on the internet
to help you choose web safe, web smart, or unsafe colors. Here
are a few:
A 216 web safe color chart can be found at:
http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/websafecolor/ And also at:
http://www.techbomb.com/websafe/
4096 Color Wheel will provide the hexadecimal values for web
safe, web smart, and unsafe colors along with different
saturations of hues and is available at:
http;//www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
4096 Color Picker & Mixer demonstrates how different colored
text appears against assorted colored backgrounds using the web
smart palette. It's available at:
http://www.webcolors.freeserve.co.uk/pick4096.htm
DHTML Color Wheel provides the hexadecimal codes for all
16,777,216 colors. It's available at:
http://www.geocities.com/~prof_al/examples/colorwheel.html
Another version of the same color wheel displays your chosen
color on the entire page. Find it at:
http://www.jeffchester.com/colorwheel.html
Although modern browsers will display over 16 million colors,
colors other than web safe colors may not display the same on
different browsers. If you choose to use colors on your web
pages from the web smart or unsafe color palettes, always view
your pages on different browsers. This is to make sure that the
colors that look great on your browser display the same or close
to the same color on other browsers.
About the author:
Ricardy Banks is a Certified Internet Consultant with WSI and
has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry.
WSI Internet
Consulting & Education
rbanks@easywsiwebsol
utions.com
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