what are “web-safe” colors?
In 1994, Netscape initiated a brilliant solution to a perennial problem with graphics operating systems that web browsers had just made much worse. Many computers at that time could only display 256 colors at a time. The choice of those colors was at the whim of application developers, and then more recently, of web site designers. When more than one program or web page or web image was visible on the screen at a time, and the colors they clamored to display totaled more than 256, there was pandemonium. Users would often see color ridiculously distorted. Netscape defined a set of 216 colors that would have priority, 6 levels each of red, green and blue, evenly spaced throughout the RGB color space. Web pages that used those colors exclusively would have a much better chance of looking right.
