Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The web palette growing obsolete

It is important to note that the web palette gets called into play on 8-bit monitors only. As mentioned earlier, 24- and 16-bit monitors do not use palettes and are capable of displaying colors without dithering.

Back in the mid-1990s, the majority of users had 8-bit monitors, making it necessary to ensure web pages would look more or less the same on all 8-bit systems.

As of this writing, 8-bit monitors account for less than 3% of traffic on the Web (or less than 1% percent, depending on whose statistics you use), and that share is continuing to shrink as old systems are retired. Many handheld devices still use 8-bit displays, but at the tiny size, there are more pressing graphic concerns than minor color shifts. As 8-bit displays vanish, so does the usefulness of the web palette.

Tip

For an excellent and in-depth technical explanation of monitor color and how the web-safe palette fails to be web safe, I highly recommend “Death of the Websafe Color Palette?” by David Lehn and Hadley Stern on Webmonkey (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/index2a.html). Although they wrote it in 2000, their findings still hold true.

Despite the fact that the web palette is on its way out, it is common to hear the name bandied about by clients and to find it handy in web authoring tools. For that reason, you may find it useful to have some level of familiarity with the palette and how to use it.