How-to #2
Choose 'web-safe' colours

Colours in browsers

The chart below gives the so-called 216 'web-safe' or 'browser-safe' colours which are guaranteed to be available on either PCs or Macs (but may appear differently on other systems, e.g. Unix).

Colour names are sometimes used in web pages. These are derived from 140 named colours used in the X Window system on the Unix operating system. Unfortunately these named colours only match the colours below in eight instances (two identical colours also have two different names). All other named colours will display correctly on a 24-bit display, will probably do so on a 16-bit colour display, but on an 8-bit (256 colour) display will move to the nearest equivalent from the chart below. In some cases, the shift will be dramatic. Moral: if you want to be sure that colours display as intended, stick wherever possible to the 216 colours shown below.

Each colour is made up of three components, a red, green, and blue (RGB) value. These values are hexadecimal and are the format required in HTML. Each cell in the chart contains its RGB value which can be copied into your web page.

The colours are made up of three hexadecimal values ranging between 0 and 255 (0 and FF in hex), where 0 represents no colour of that hue. So, for example, the colour 33FFCC (a bright green-blue) contains a red value of 33, a green value of FF, and a blue value of CC. You will see in the table below that in fact, all the colour values can be one of only six distinct values (00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF). So any colour made up of three pairs of values in this range will be 'web-safe'.

Colour table

Page last updated: March 14th 2004

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