Hey fellow geeks,
With the state of computers today, is the restricted “web safe” color palette relevant anymore?
I wasn’t sure what you were referring to, so I went and looked it up. The web-safe palette appears to be a restricted (216 colors) palette that allows people viewing your site in 256 colors to see it as it was designed. In answer to your question, we have this site:
Seems to me it’s akin to designing your website to be Lynx-friendly. It’s hardly necessary these days, but if you can do it, it’s a point of pride.
I don’t think they’re relevant anymore. Sure, you can keep designing websites to keep up with archaic standards to suit 0.001% of the web population, but where do you draw the line? You’d also have to end up avoiding Javascript, frames, Flash, and a myriad of other web technologies that are considered “standard” today.
A properly designed website will be Lynx-friendly by default, even if you don’t know what Lynx is.
But I agree that the web-safe palette is no longer a necessity. Go nuts making stuff bright pink and neon orange.
It’s all a question of numbers. There are still a few people out there using ancient computers and browsers, and if you don’t use web-safe colors, your web page may not show up right for those people. Do you care? That depends on your website, and what proportion of your visitors use such an ancient browser.
This one, though, is actually a fair bit more relevant. Lynx itself is very rare, now, but the same features that make a site friendly to Lynx will also make it friendly to many other browsers which aren’t rare. Most notably, screen-readers (used by blind folks) and bots (such as search engine spiders) will usually only pick up on the words in a webpage, so you want to put your content into words as much as possible.
Addendum:
It’s quite possible to create a webpage which uses Java, frames, and Flash, but which is still standards-compliant and Lynx-friendly. All of those technologies were designed in such a way as to be backwards-compatible, and HTML itself was designed to be forward-compatible to accomodate expansion. There are ways to signal to a web browser “If you didn’t understand the code I just told you to display, then show this instead”. On a well-designed website, the “show this instead” material will have the same content as the Java and Flash, if possible. Obviously, if your content is video games that you can play in the browser, then there’s not much you can do beyond apologizing and giving the user links to modern browsers/plugins, if the browser can’t do Java and Flash, but if your content is a news article, or technical specifications for a product, or the like, then it darned well ought to be accessible to a text-only browser. Unfortunately, all too many web sites nowadays will just tell you “sorry, no can do”, regardless of the nature of the content.
Concur - particularly as that’s pretty much how a search engine’s spider will view the page.
Atari Lynx could browse the web? 
I still use web safe colours when I’m initially putting together a site, only because it’s easy to remember the hex codes available. But then I go back in to introduce subtle colours and gradients.
We are in an age of LCD monitors and HD streaming video. The odds of anyone using a browser that requires the web safe palette these days is approaching zero.
I don’t think they are THAT relevant but to a degree, I work in a place with a lot of different monitors, and different brands render colors differently. So if you stick to your basics, it will look pretty good.
I’ve seen some colors like “pumpkin orange” range from really red to yellowish red depending on the type of monitor.
It’s basically the same but red looks red on all monitors while an off red is not the same on all of them. Even now.
Web-safe colors may be dead but you definitely want to make sure that your site is viewable in a text-only browser. As others have said, spiders can only crawl your site if they can find text and everything in Google comes from their spiders. If Google can’t find your site, your customers can’t either.
Don’t think of it as designing for Lynx… think of it as designing for Google.
Web-safe colors (216 color palette) came into being when the technology to create color was very limited when using Windows vs Mac machines out of 256 colors available. (Text-only machines were irrelevant to the discussion at the time because the color rendition was always dark vs light – light text on a dark background being the standard. Anyone remember the Hercules graphics card tied with an Amdek monitor? High quality graphics rendered (at the time) with a green or orange text on a dark background?) The cross-browser and cross-platform color mix were these 216 colors common to Windows and Mac. Color issues with respect to accessibility, colorblindness, usability, and “standards” were effectively non-existent.
The technology barrier was surpassed as more and more colors became available, and made it into the mass market. Today, we are talking about millions of colors, thanks to the technology. The original web-safe color barrier is dead and there is no technological reason to support it.
While color rendering technology took off, acceptance of standards and research into accessibility (color blindness, the ability to perceive and understand information “broadcast” by a CRT) also took off. However, acceptance of “standards” still remains slow compared to the technology available, and the societal need to provide information that does not disproportionately discriminate against people with disabilities (cognitive, physical, etc.). The Target.com case is the current classic example when the technology to create/maintain an accessible commercial web site has existed for quite a while. However, the mindset of Target management to address disabled people who use the web and are customers the same as non-disabled customers using the web is the real issue.
A properly constructed web site will adhere to W3C standards-compliance and web accessibility (WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 for US-based sites) minimizing, if not eliminating disability barriers. At the same time, those who may still be using a Lynx browser will find the same site usable and accessible. They will not experience the bells and whistles if they used Firefox, Opera, Safari or other fully rendering browsers because of the technological limitations of the Lynx browser itself. At the same time, a properly constructed web site will have separated presentation from style so the information available to Lynx users will not be lost. (The real rub here are site owners and designers who allow the cutting-edge technology to drive their business desires (cart before the horse). This is the road to reduced business returns, if not outright failure, because they will always be chasing the Holy Grail and not minding the core business needs, serving the customers. OTOH, a business that has identified their core business values and base their technology decisions on these values will be on the road to “success.” )
Build and maintain a web site that meets standards and accessibility. Use whatever colors you desire. Do all this that meet the business needs of the owner and Bob’s your uncle.
I stand corrected on the Lynx-accessible angle.
However bear in mind this does not excuse you from making your background mauve, puce, or teal shudder.
Then again, I’m of the persuasion that hunts down and kills people who are technically standards compliant, but who have pages that look like shit, but they think the colors are “teh c00lz”*. So you have to word it very, very nicely lest you be battered by a “I’ll do whatever I want with MY page!” response when you’re just trying to make a friendly suggestion about not making your eyes bleed trying to read the content that you’re genuinely interested in. (drilling this into the journalism staff/students at my old high school took some doing after I took over the web page and gave it much needed salvation)
I’d still avoid Flash. Flash APPLICATIONS (i.e. games or animations) are fine, but flash sites tend to be bloated and nine times out of ten don’t work intuitively to the user’s needs (I shouldn’t have to use esoteric buttons to get back to where I want, hitting back three times should do it, not finding whatever passes for “back” using your patented (not-so-)clever buttons system, also, the scroll bars tend to suck).
Obviously I’m using a pretty broad brush here, but I’ve rarely found a GOOD Flash site, even including professional ones.
Or was that too much opinion for GQ and too far away from the original post? If so, sorry, didn’t mean too. I only realized that it might be after I typed for a good while but figured I might as well post my input.
Fun fact, “teh” is not a word according to Firefox, fair enough. But somehow “c00lz” is.
America is in an age of LCD monitors and HD streaming video. I hobbled on to the web in many an African cyber cafe with a 256-color browser. If you are hoping to have your message seen by people in the world’s poorest places, it might be a good idea to design your site with the thought that some people might be using 15 year old computers.
Here is a nice little site that might help you out. It allows you to test your site with differnt browsers and OSs