In IE the color looks like a yellowish orange. On safari it looks bright yellow. I thought web safe colors were supposed to be consistent across platforms?
#FFFF99
Thanks.
If you are using 16 bit colour on your monitor then that isn’t a web safe colour. There are only 7 colours that overlap between the 8 bit and 16 bit colour ranges and apart from black and white most of the rest are shades of green.
As long as you don’t try to mix background colours and colours in images you will not get a situation where the same original colour ends up mapping to two different colours on the screen. As long as you don’t expect it to appear an exact colour everywhere all 16 million + colours are safe to use.
It’s rare to get colours to match exactly on different monitors even if you plug them into the same computer! All monitors are slightly different, and colour temperature settings will also affect the exact shade and tone.
different monitors might also be using different colour profiles.
I once got a shock when I saw a familiar web page I’d made on the spare monitor I had plugged into my laptop. Then I dragged the window across so half was displaying on the monitor and the other half on the laptop screen. Very different looking.
I once did some work for a client and the main designer was pulling her hair out as he kept altering shades of blue to the point where the only way she could tell the sample pages apart on screen was to view the css to check the colour. But he apparently could see differences on his monitor. He couldn’t understand that what he saw was probably different to what each of the next couple of dozen site visitors would see on their computer.
Consistency of perceived colour across platforms and displays was not the intention of “Web Safe Colors”. It attempted to specify colours that would not dither on 8-bit displays.
They almost certainly are if one is attached to a PC and the other to a Mac.
Also beware that Safari on the Mac can COMPLETELY screw with the gamma correction, making any color channel values above #80 end up brighter than you planned.
Kind of the same problem IE has with it’s handling of Gamma. In Apple’s case they assume you are going to use one of their colormatch displays, and STILL run a ‘for print’ calibration… which nobody working outside print actually does.
THOUGH if you design with a default setting and then show it on a color for print machine, it can also end up screwed up.
But… #FFFF99 is light yellow – if you are seeing orange in IE, the IE machine is the one that’s screwed up. Equal amounts of red and green makes yellow, with the blue channel adding brightness.
Might also be the colour temperature. The same colour will look very different at 5000K, 6500K and 9300K.
What it amounts to, is that if your site depends upon an exact perfect rendering of some particular colour or colour scheme across multiple browsers, monitors, operating systems, and computer hardware, then your site is broken. Period.
The web is not paper.
Thank you Ed. I knew it but your reminder set me free from my compulsive perfectionism. 