About the Netscape Colors

Netscape offers only 216 non-dithering colors in its palette for the Windows version of Navigator running in 8-bit display mode (about 20 colors are reserved for the Windows desktop, and 20 for Netscape's desktop and animated logo). Using the ns3 custom palette for your GIF image means that viewers using a Windows platform with a 256-color VGA monitor will see an image not further dithered by the Netscape application at runtime -- the 216+ colors that make up the image are exactly those already in Navigator's palette. Running on Macintosh platforms, however, Navigator uses the full 256-color Macintosh system palette. So images saved in Photoshop's System palette will display without dithering on Macintoshes. Images dithered to the Macintosh System palette run the risk of using one or more of the 40 special colors for Windows, which may then be dithered by Navigator on Windows platforms and may cause strange effects. Images saved with the Netscape custom palette will always display the same in Netscape Navigator on both platforms.

The RRGGBB hexadecimal red-green-blue triplet is how a color is described to an HTML browser so it can properly display the colors of your HTML document. The value represented by "RR", "GG", or "BB" is a hexadecimal value in the range of 0 to 255 describing the iuntensity of the red, green, or blue color: 00 (the decimal value of 0) means that that color component is totally off and FF (the decimal value of 255) means that the color is totally on. When you mix varing amounts of red, green, and blue colors, the results can be a rainbow from 000000 (black) to FFFFFF (white).

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