The 216 Browser Safe Colors

Before the days of High Color and True Color, older computer monitors (back in the late 1990s) displayed only 256 colors because they only had 8-bit video cards. Even different Web browsers had their own unique palette of 256 colors, but they all had some colors in common.  These common colors are called the "Browser Safe Colors"  or "216 Web Palette" and they all displayed the same in all the Web browsers.

So if you wanted to display a graphic on the web and you wanted to make sure that all the colors in the graphic displayed correctly, then you had to use only Browser Safe Colors. 

With today's high color monitors and powerful graphics cards, the use of Browser Safe Colors isn't nearly as important.  But if you have a simple graphic (less than 256 colors), then sticking with Browser Safe Colors is a good idea because you know for sure that it will look the same to everyone who views it on the Web.

HEX Representation of Colors

So for the HEX number "00FF00", it has no RED or BLUE color, and has a maximum of the GREEN component.  So this number represents the color GREEN.

RGB Representation of Colors

In the RGB Color System a color is represented by three numbers.  The color GREEN is represented by the numbers "0 255 0".  Where Red=0, Green=255 and the color Blue=0.  Each component number can have a value of "0" up to "255" for the maximum. 

In the Browser Safe Colors table below, the HEX representation for each color is given.  For the Hex values, these are the RGB equivalent values:

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