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"Browser safe" colors

Colors when displayed by a computer monitor are made up of different intensities of the three primary colors (red, green and blue). These intensities are usually ranged between a value of 0 (zero) and 255. This provides 17,367,040 possible color combinations and is referred to as 24-bit color In the early days of the Internet, it was decided that there would be a limit of 8 bits to describe a color on a web page. This could provide 256 possible color combinations.

In order to standardize which colors were visible on a web page, it was decided to allow 6 intensities of each color, which provides 216 color combinations. These intensities are usually presented or requested using hexadecimal notation and are the values 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF.

The table of graphic squares below provides a means of picking these "Browser safe" colors. The numbers across the top are the red or "R" portion of the "RRGGBB" color code. The numbers on the right are the green ("G") and blue ("B") portions.