Websafe falls down a little in 16bit. I didn't worry about it because I figured there's very few people running 1995 era 2mb video cards. Then I learned that an iMac at 1024x768 is limited to 16bit. Which means many of my pages don't look good for a lot of people, and that's not the idea.

16bit only works perfectly with a few of the 216 colours, mostly green, but I wondered how many were passable. Hence this coarse tool; what you see will depend on your eyesight, your monitor, and your browser. Mileage will vary with other eyes and monitors and browsers, so understand it's a compromise. I only post it here to save anyone else making 216 little gifs to satisfy their curiosity. Each gif is 25x15 and is in the upper left corner of the cell.

Feel free to download it. Here's the zip. Make your own version. If you know js, perhaps you could combine it with Ideo's brilliant Color Visualizer, so we'd have one tool that does everything.

So far I've tested this on six browsers across three machines, and the results are unsettling. Netscape 6 is consistently awful. You can spot the gifs from across the room. N4, Opera, and the Explorers vary gently among themselves and on different machines, as to which gifs are slightly noticeable. It may not be possible to select some 'passable' colours from this array, but that's worth learning too. What I'd like to do is test the browsers on a few iMacs, since that's the issue group.

Note: don't resize the gifs with the HTML, use your graphics editor. I noticed that a stretched gif gets its colour reinterpreted by the browser and then matches the bg, spoiling the test.

23sep01 Owen Briggs