March 19, 2002

5:09 PM

Most internet users have monitors that can display more colors than the 216 that are used in the traditional “browser-safe” palette. moreCrayons is a bigger box of crayons; 4,096 colors for the web. A site by our own kirkaracha. [Via Zeldman]
posted by riffola (14 comments total)

This is good news that I've noticed lately. In fact, even Dell is shipping a lot of new computers with screens 15+ inches with preset defaults of 32 bit true color and resolutions in the 1400s.
posted by tomorama at 5:32 PM on March 19, 2002

excellent link riffola.
as for monitors, yes i've noticed that too. the majority of people who now browse the web are running 32bit color and 800x600 resolution whether they know it or not. hopefully soon the default will become higher and higher. i've long since stopped designing for lower resolutions. especially since they look terrible on my 1200...
posted by sixtwenty3dc at 5:44 PM on March 19, 2002

Sweet. Thanks to kirkaracha for the cool tool, and riffola for the link.

Default color on the slider should be #006699, though. Heh.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:51 PM on March 19, 2002

wow, what fun you can have toggling that cube!
Great link, Riff.
posted by dash_slot- at 6:20 PM on March 19, 2002

What does "32-bit" mean? 24 bits for RGB and what? Alpha? How does that work?
posted by rodii at 6:35 PM on March 19, 2002

IIRC, it means the graphics processor can whack bytes around, instead of having to fudge about with 6-bit values.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:48 PM on March 19, 2002

OK, I don't get the point here. Sure most people are running in better bit depths these days, but the idea of a non-dithering pallete for a web page has been throughly debunked, and they even link to the page that has the best explaination of why it's a bogus idea to begin with.

rodii: with video cards 32 bit is just a speed/size trade off. With 32bit you consume extra ram, but you can access the information more quickly since you're working with 4 byte boundries which makes addressing easier.

This page has a good explaination, just hop down to "Monitor Color Depth
posted by betaray at 7:08 PM on March 19, 2002

I don't have much to add to this other than, "Hell, yeah!" but I do have to say that I love the name CodeBitch.
posted by Su at 7:39 PM on March 19, 2002

Thanks, beta. So in terms of actual color depth, 24-bit and 32-bit are identical.
posted by rodii at 7:47 PM on March 19, 2002

betaray: that webmonkey article was pawed over and they seem to have got their results by trialing colour display on the platforms they had rather than understanding the display issues on different platforms.
posted by holloway at 8:21 PM on March 19, 2002

rodii: correct

holloway: Are you saying that their results are incorrect? The platforms have display issues. Netscape was notorious for reproducing the same color differently in BGCOLOR vs. a GIF. Windows and Mac have completely different gamma settings that wildly distort colors. People don't have proffesional monitor calibration. Most video cards main focus isn't on color reproduction. Hell my ambient lighting changes dramaticly near my montitor during the day!

My point is that that limiting yourself to some "safe" pallete is a waste of your time. It's going to look wrong on some one's computer, and it's not your fault. The only thing you can do is veiw your content on a variety of machines and make sure nothing crazy happens.
posted by betaray at 12:03 AM on March 20, 2002

OK, I feel bad now that I found the one comment out of 270 (a link would've been nice). That contradicts one of my points.

While what this poster says is true and valid, it just points out how unpredictable another platform is going to be. Another example, most modern video cards do not work this way, but for some "16-bit" displays you have a 8-bit displayable pallete. Since there are a fairly limited number of displable colors, this means running different software while looking at a web page, or having 2 different webpages open at once would effect the way both display.

So, again, if you want 100% color reproduction print out your website.
posted by betaray at 12:13 AM on March 20, 2002

What a darn purty website. I am going to have much fun with this. Thanks, Kirkaracha.

Added bennies of this post - by reading it I found out that I'm the recipient of a laminated copy of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. ( Click on the via Zeldman link ;). I'd like to thank all the little people.
posted by iconomy at 6:09 AM on March 20, 2002

holloway: Are you saying that their results are incorrect?

No, not really. It was just a link about your link and I didn't mean it to respond to any of your points. Sorry. I meant that the methods used in that article weren't the best.

There are safer palettes than others and that's all the websafe palette should have ever been taken as. Too much is law, from Jakob to Joel (on Software) to building a design out of the web safe palette. There's so little understanding and I was dissapointed to see that webmonkey article so ready to cast another law. It's not open debate. It's not "send in your results". It's lecturing. It's not scientific.
posted by holloway at 7:37 PM on March 20, 2002