Re: CSS1 and Color - infrastructure availability clarified

On Nov 30,  4:11pm, David Perrell wrote:
> Now, if only display board mfgrs would move to 'deprecate' indexed
> color and promote 24-bit as a standard. You can't have good web color
> if you're limited to a 216-color fixed palette or dithered color. At
> the very least the UA makers need to do adaptive or settable palettes.

What he said. Twice.


> Of course this presents problems with backward compatibility, since
> optimized images could look terrible on browsers limited to the NS-216
> color set.

Not so terrible, depends on the dithering method used. And not all
browsers use the NS-216 colors, including some NS ones ;-) and images which
are hacked into NS-216 rather than an adaptive palette look so poor on a
truecolor or hicolor display.

> But perhaps with a special OBJECT type an author could
> specify optimized images for those browsers that understand the type
> but fall back to standard NS-216 images for those that don't.

Sounds messy. There are proposals which use HTTP headers to indicate
aspects of the display, including color depth; the server can send the
appropriate image.

Thankfully, NS-216 palette is still not a standard.




-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 2 December 1996 13:05:39 UTC