Hexadecimal colour notation (was: Re: Attach event/function to linkswithin span tag)

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

I associate the term with an article that I read some time back on
webmonkey, in which they concluded there were less than a couple of
dozen colours which were truly safe.

Google suggests it must have been this one (or rather, this is the
starting point - it links to various segments):
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/...html?tw=design

LOL! Thank you for pointing out to this article - I had some real fun
of reading it. So now we have (always had) only 22 colors - mainly
greenish - for all our web-design ideas. :-)

But before jump on these Truly Deeply Safe Colors one may want to
repeat the proposed tests with different *video cards* and different
*video drivers*. I guess some old Trident, Matrox Me and GForce would
be sufficient to conclude that Truly Deeply Safe Palette consists of 0
(none) colors, so any attempt of cross-platform web-development is
futile by its nature :-)

Authors confused hell of color notation issues and hardware output
issues (and I stay wondering if they set at least the same Color
Profile for all involved machines).

The whole moral of the entire thread remains the same: do not talk or
write (specially on some official standard pages) about matters you
have to clue about.

(If you care to try reading this, you might want to adjust your
browser beforehand against the hail of cookies and popups.)

Thanks for advise: Firefox does it for me by default ;-)

No doubt it was all well-meant, in their own terms

Oh for sure. It was for good intentions (the hell is paved with them
:-)

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:58:04 +0000 from Alan J. Flavell
<flavell (AT) physics (DOT) gla.ac.uk>:

I associate the term with an article that I read some time back on
webmonkey, in which they concluded there were less than a couple of
dozen colours which were truly safe.

Google suggests it must have been this one (or rather, this is the
starting point - it links to various segments):
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/...html?tw=design

(If you care to try reading this, you might want to adjust your
browser beforehand against the hail of cookies and popups.)

Or use a decent browser, such as Mozilla. :-) I don't know about
cookies, but all popups were blocked silently.

No doubt it was all well-meant, in their own terms, but I'd have drawn
quite different conclusions from the same observations.

Also, that page is fairly old -- I believe it cites Netscape 4.07 and
IE 5 as the latest browsers, with IE 5.5 expected soon. The Windows
version used was "9x". I'm pretty confident that results would be
different if the identical tests were performed on today's browsers
and today's operating system. (I'm confident of "different", but
whether better or worse I wouldn't care to guess.)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, VK wrote:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/...html?tw=design

LOL! Thank you for pointing out to this article - I had some real
fun of reading it.

You know, I started off by calling it a "rather silly article", but
then I thought perhaps it's better to leave the readers to draw their
own conclusions about that. Evidently you did :-)

But before jump on these Truly Deeply Safe Colors one may want to
repeat the proposed tests with different *video cards* and different
*video drivers*. I guess some old Trident, Matrox Me and GForce
would be sufficient to conclude that Truly Deeply Safe Palette
consists of 0 (none) colors,

Design actions, based on those observations at one point in time,
would also pre-suppose that software writers would never adopt any
improvements in their browser/display strategies.

so any attempt of cross-platform web-development is
futile by its nature :-)

If your first priority was accurate colour-matching, then you would
surely have reached that conclusion long ago! Web design is a whole
galaxy of compromises, and everyone has to prioritise those
compromises as they see fit. What more can I say (well, plenty, but
I'll stop there for now).