What do Web Safe Colors Mean?

Browser safe colors or web safe colors are a set of 216 colors which are displayed in a consistent, non-dithered and solid way on any web browser and computer monitor. These colors would be able to display 8-bit colors. The reason why instead of 256 colors the palette has just 216 colors is that only 216 colors would be displayed in the exact same way on all the computers.

This discrepancy is quite similar to when a user opens a word document created on Mac and sees that quite a lot of odd characters instead of the characters and punctuation marks. Although the basic numerals map, upper case and lower case characters map similarly on all types of platforms, some characters like accented characters, currency symbols etc would be treated differently by computers.

The same thing happens with colors. On the Windows monitor what is considered as gray would be displayed as another color on a Mac browser. Like there are a few common numbers and characters which are consistent on all computer platforms, there are also a few consistent colors. These colors are known as the web safe or the browser safe colors.

Background on Web safe Colors

HTML colors for combinations of different color values of RGB colors- red, green, blue, are defined through a hexadecimal notation. Any light source can be given highest value of 255 or 0 which is lowest value. The hex values are basically 3 double digit numerical which start with the # sign.

The different values of the RGB color combinations from 0 to 255, i.e. from the lowest to highest total more than 16 million types of different colors that you can experiment with. All monitors display as many as 16348 colors in all.

If a website has a background in solid color the best thing would be to use a web safe color. That would ensure that the color would be displayed in the same manner on all platforms. The background would be displayed non-dithered and absolutely clear.

The Standard Names of the Colors on the Web:

Given below is the list of the names of colors on the internet which are considered valid for CSS and HTML by the W3C- the World Wide Web Consortium.

COLORS colors application