The 216 Colour Browser-Safe Palette

Run your cursor over the different colors in the palette and see the background colour change to match it. Click a color to lock it in place. The hexadecimal "color" code will be displayed in the text box above the palette. The code may then be selected with the mouse, copied using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C, and then pasted into your HTML using Ctrl+V. Continue with selecting colors by clicking within the palette and moving on to the next colour of interest.

Hexadecimal color code:

Use of this palette ensures that areas of colour on 256-color systems are displayed without graininess from "dithering" (colour-matching by mixing two or more colors to simulate a colour unavailable in the palette). The 40 remaining colors of the 256 are used by the system to display the portions of your screen's "real-estate" hijacked by your browser. Try the Arachne graphical browser for DOS for the option of displaying webpages fullscreen!

This palette uses a mathematical approach to give an even distribution of colours. Graphics packages generally use decimal values for Red-Green-Blue. The equivalent values are as follows:   00 = 00,   33 = 51,   66 = 102,   99 = 153,   CC = 204   and   FF = 255.

Other palettes are available for graphics software, with a greater emphasis placed on fleshtones etc. to allow acceptable quality color-depth reduction of photographic images. Photographs to be displayed at small scale onscreen can look fine when reduced to 32 or even 16 colours and saved as GIFs. These images will then download and display more quickly than their high color depth counterparts.

This page has been designed to be easily saved to your own machine for offline use. It is one of a series of practical webtools developed by Jake Young, email: jake@wymondham.zzn.com