Web safe Colors

What are they and what are they used for?

Web safe Colors are colors that display on a consistent manner across all devices. Web safe colors are supposed to from a palette of 256 colors. Of these 256 colors only 216 are used. The only reason 216 are used is because those are the only ones that remain consistent across all platforms.

The reason we use web safe colors are because of the way that different devices handle the different colors. While something may be displayed as white on a windows device, a mac may display it as yellow. Web safe colors originated because computers used to be capable of only displaying 256 colors at one time. When the color palette was created though the web was not up for public use. As well as most developers didn’t use the same color palette.

In the effort to give certain colors a more distinct appearance there was a process called dithering. This involved the use of geometric patterns and it would hopefully create the appearance of more colors. This wasn’t exactly super successful though. In our modern web safe palette, we no longer use these dithered colors.