Re: Color Palette Incompatibilities

Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
> 
> ><!-- There are also 16 widely known color names:
> >
> >    Black  = #000000    Green  = #008000
> >    Silver = #C0C0C0    Lime   = #00FF00
> >    Gray   = #808080    Olive  = #808000
> >    White  = #FFFFFF    Yellow = #FFFF00
> >    Maroon = #800000    Navy   = #000080
> >    Red    = #FF0000    Blue   = #0000FF
> >    Purple = #800080    Teal   = #008080
> >    Fuchsia= #FF00FF    Aqua   = #00FFFF
> >
> > These colors were originally picked as being the standard
> > 16 colors supported with the Windows VGA palette. The above
> > gives the sRGB values in hex (#RRGGBB).
> > -->
> 
> There is a problem with half of these colors -- "80" and "C0" are not in
> the 216-color dither-free cross-platform palette used by Netscape, Mosaic,
> and Internet Explorer. The included codes are 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF.

If it cannot display half and quarter saturated colours, then I'd say
there's something wrong with the choice of palette!

So we need to limit web development to what Netscape Mosaic & IE can
display on a Windows 256 colour machine?  On my computer I have no need to
dither any of the above colours, but do have to dither &33 and &66 and
&99. 

> I'm not crazy about the palette (only 4 shades of grey?!), but it *is* the
> standard cross-platform palette.

It's the standard Microsoft palette.  I have a proper 256 colour palette
on my computer (when in a 256 colour screen mode - I can use the standard
facility to up to colour resolution should I require more colours)

The colour names leave an awful lot to be desired and seem to be
designed to perpetuate confusion.  Some of the ones I object to are:
Gray (US specific spelling), Fuchsia (not standard name for this
colour, plus it could be any kind of red/pink/red tined white), Silver
(this is light grey), Green (should be 00ff00), Lime (varies across
platforms - X11 is different to Windows), Teal (eventually I managed to
find out what this was (I asked here before for some RGB values for
this colour before the RGB triplets were in the document and had no
answer - so presumably it isn't a well-known colour) - if I found a
freshwater duck this colour, I'd be worried about what was in the
water), Aqua (not standard name for this colour)

Grey should be an alternative spelling for Gray.

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/      http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Received on Friday, 6 September 1996 07:49:59 UTC