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What are web safe colors?
How to use WSCC
The options window
Minimum system requirements
Hex values and color names
Contact the author

What are web safe colors?

We all want our web pages to look as good as possible, right? As a web designer, you probably have a monitor and graphics card which can display thousands, if not millions of colors. Unfortunately, this is not true for the rest of the surfing universe. There are a lot of web users out there who are stuck with 256-color monitors. So, if your web site uses colors their monitor cannot display, they will not see the colors you have chosen but a substitute color, or even a mix of two other colors. So you can wave goodbye to all those tedious hours you spent making your colors beautiful...
     The answer? Web safe colors. There are 216 colors which can be displayed by web browsers on all color monitors, everywhere. So when you are choosing background or text colors for your pages, or deciding on a palette for your graphics, you need to pick from these 216 colors. The Web Safe Color Chart helps you to make your choice, by enabling you to try different background/text color combinations which you know will look the same wherever they're seen.

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How to use the Web Safe Color Chart

The main screen of WSCC is divided into three sections: a control panel along the top, an information panel down the left and the color chart itself.

screen shot

     The basic idea is that, if you click on a color in the color chart, the information panel will display that color, as well as its hexadecimal value and HTML 4.0 color name. The control panel lets you toggle between text and background color, so you can try out different color combinations: if background is active the color you click on will be displayed in the background; if text is active it will be displayed as text.
     The two drop-down menus allow you to choose between two modes for the color which is inactive: 'Auto' and 'Select'. 'Auto' means the color will switch automatically between black and white to provide a contrast with the active color you choose; 'Select' means the color will stay the same until you activate it and change it. This means you can choose your background color, for example, and then try several text colors without having to reset the background each time.

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The options window

You can click on 'options' in the control panel to set your preferences. The values you can set are:
 
value default
the width and height of each of the colors in the color chart 75/20
the number of colors in one line of the table 6
whether you want a white border between colors on
whether you want WSCC to save your preferences for the next time you use the program on

     This last option requires that cookies be activated to function properly; if you disactivate cookies the program will use the default values at the beginning of each session.

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Minimum system requirements

The Web Safe Color Chart requires a browser which is capable of displaying frames and which can run JavaScript 1.1. In practice, that means Netscape Navigator 3 or above, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or above, or another equivalent browser. If your browser cannot run WSCC, we recommend that you download the latest version of Navigator or Explorer.

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Hex values and color names

When a color is displayed by The Web Safe Color Chart, two pieces of information are given: the hex value and the color name. To understand these values, you need to know a little about how HTML describes colors.
     In a 65536-color system, every color is a combination of three primary colors: red, green and blue. Each primary color has an intensity of between 0 and 255 (256^3=65536). Thus for pure red, the red value is 255, and the green and blue values are 0; if all three values are 0 the color is black, and white has all three values at 255. A red value of 51, a green value of 153 and a blue value of 153 gives a blue-gray color (the color of this text). In HTML, these values are usually written in the form of a 'hex triplet' (three hexadecimal numbers between 00 and FF, preceded by a # symbol): our blue-gray corresponds to the hex triplet #339999 (51 = hex 33 and 153 = hex 99). Similarly, pure red is #FF0000, black is #000000 and white corresponds to the triplet #FFFFFF.
     As far as web safe colors are concerned, the only possible hex values are 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF. Thus, #3366FF is a web safe color; #3366BB is not.
     As well as these hex values, the HTML 4.0 standard defines some standard color names which can be used in place of the hex notation. When a standard color name exists for a color, WSCC displays that name below the value.

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Contact the author

First of all, let me thank you for choosing and using the Web Safe Color Chart. I hope it makes your life easier, and your web pages better. If you have any comments on WSCC - praise, criticism, bugs, ideas, suggestions, I can take them all - please send me an email or fill out the feedback form; anything helpful will be taken into consideration for future versions of the program. Happy colorin'!
 
Neil Martin

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