March 20, 2002

More crayons—and a lesson in HTML

People may be wondering what happened to the 216-colour “web-safe” palette. Besides increasing irrelevance in the face of improving technology, some have also pointed out that it is less than infallible.

So let's assume that the lowest common denominator is no longer 8-bit colour (256 colours), but 16-bit (still more than half of all users). We still need to ensure that colours display consistently across all 16-bit and 24-bit monitors. Enter the 4096-colour “web-smart” palette:

…a 16-by-16-by-16 cube of 4096 colors. The web-smart palette uses any combination of 00, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, aa, bb, cc, dd, and ff, and provides a more complete gamut that should display consistently on monitors that support thousands (16-bit color) and millions (24-bit color) of colors. Most of the colors dither to the nearest browser-safe color on 256-color monitors.

The main purpose of this site is to provide a resource for web designers and developers to test this expanded palette. The web-smart palette pages show different demonstrations of the palette. If you adjust the bit depth of your monitor, you can evaluate how the colors display at different resolutions.

The site does a great job of providing the means to preview and select colours from the palette.

But even if you're not interested in the colour issue, do pay a visit. The site's not only impeccably researched and clearly written, but it's a case study in scrupulous and thorough HTML practice:

1. Validating XHTML and CSS


2. Entirely laid out using CSS, tables used for tabular data only*


3. Structural markup throughout – tables with THEAD, TBODY, COLGROUP tags, SUMMARY and SCOPE attributes; forms with FIELDSETs, LABELs, OPTGROUPs, etc.; CITEs, definition lists, etc.


4. Proper ISO10646 smart quotes – “ and ” instead of " (inch-marks)

*1 demerit for using fixed instead of relative font units.

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