[Sigia-l] web safe colors

[Listera]

"Mike Combs" wrote:

> I disagree with Ziya. <ducking>

You'll be quartered and fried ;-)
 
> You need to know your audience.  I design intranet applications for a large
> company where all the branch offices use thin clients for to access the
> Internet, and they only see 256 colors on their monitors.

Well you just described the NN4 situation.

In Sept 2002, Netscape 4.x had  9,731,613 (2%) share. If your audience is
"general" you have to think about doing something special for that 2%.
However, your *specific* audience may have as much as 10% NN4 browser share,
so the stakes might be higher.

Same with compression. I'm not even sure if you can go out buy a PC with
anything less than a 16-bit card these days. So those with 8-bit cards are
in a very small minority. In Sept 2002 this was the breakdown:

16bit   146284473 (46%)
32bit   122135726 (39%)
24bit   31216294 (10%)
8bit   11187155 (3%) (Roughly the NN4 share)

> I take the approach of graceful degradation.  If you stray from the web safe
> world, then pick colors that will degrade best when viewed on a 256 color
> monitor - and test the pages in 256 colors.

The problem here is that (I think Morry already alluded to this) 8-bit cards
do NOT give you 256 web safe colors. The number is far less than that.
Furthermore, optimizing via 8-bit web safe colors produce unwanted effects
in some 16-bit cards. And so on.

So unless you *know* that your audience is primarily and/or critically
composed of 8-bit card or NN4 browser users, I'd say don't waste your time.
Make sure the content is legible/accessible but optimizing it for those
(decidedly) dying niches is effort at 2-3% return. Is it worth your time?

Best,

Ziya