Are Web Safe Colors important? 

Not anymore. There was a time where the computer could only display a certain number of colors on a screen, the max being 256 colors. Web Safe colors consisted of a small palette of 216 colors and used a technique called ‘dithering’ that made it appear like there were more colors than the ones that were really being presented by adding ‘noise’. Dithering creates a smoother finished image and reduces bands across the screen of your device.

We are living in a more technologically advanced world than it was in the past, screens show colors using bitmaps which can hold millions of color. If you think about it we’re kind of a spoiled generation aren’t we? Games and animations with such extensive design, it’s pretty impressive to see how far we’ve come.

What Are Web Safe Colors Exactly?

Web safe colors are RGB values determined by a mathematical formula consisting of multiples of 51, and that’s about as exact as I am going to get. However if you do want to use Web safe colors then do so when your site is a single solid color or if you make a graphic with an invisible background. 

Web colors can be in the format RGB (red-green-blue) or in hexadecimal form. A hexadecimal uses specific color codes followed by a hashtag sign. There are about 24 bits that specify these.

The Updates that started it all

HTML(1-5#) are software fixers that insert certain patterns into the systems code to tweak bugs and improve on the last update. HTML5 was released in 2008, so about a good twelve years back; the goal was to add new and improved elements to the application. And that it did, language improvements and grammar corrections were made, as well as color improvements.

Thanks to those improvements there isn’t really a need for Web Safe Colors anymore; as well as many of the other things that we used in the past. But if you were to open Photoshop,  they have an option where you can choose to apply Web Safe Colors still. It all depends on the aesthetic choices that one has for their website I suppose. Like I mentioned above, there are still cases where you can use Web Safe Colors.

And there you go, pretty much a whole article of information just to tell you that you really don’t need Web Safe Colors. Your Welcome.