
346
Part II
Designing and Crafting Basic Pages
Dreamweaver’s Color Pickers
D
reamweaver includes a color picker for selecting colors for all manner of HTML elements: text, table
cells, and page background. Dreamweaver’s color picker—in keeping with the Adobe common user
interface—offers a number of palettes from the context menu from which to choose your colors: Color Cubes,
Continuous Tone, Windows OS, Mac OS, and Grayscale. The most common choices for Web designers are
Color Cubes and Continuous Tone, both of which display the 216 Web-safe colors common to the Macintosh
and Windows palettes.
After you’ve opened the text color picker by selecting the color box on the Property inspector, the cursor
changes shape into an eyedropper that can sample colors from any of the displayed swatches or from any color
onscreen. Simply click the color box and drag the eyedropper over any graphic to choose a color.
If you choose a color outside of the safe range, you have no assurances of how the color is rendered on a
viewer’s browser. Some systems select the closest color in RGB values; some use dithering (positioning two
or more colors next to each other to simulate another color) to try to overcome the limitations of the current
screen color depth. Therefore, be forewarned: If possible, stick with the browser-safe colors, especially when
coloring text. Select the Snap-To-Web–Safe option in ...