The 216 Color Palette
AKA the "Browser Safe" Pallete
Copyright (C) 1998 by H. Marc Lewis

These are the 216 colors in the standard color palette used by both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. If you restrict your color choices to these colors then you will get 'pure' colors (not dithered) on a standard 256-color VGA class video display. Note: as of March 1998, the majority of web browsers world-wide are running in 256 color mode.

The color cells contain the RGB (Red/Green/Blue) values in hexadecimal as used by attributes such as BGCOLOR or COLOR. The color code represents 3 bytes (6 hex digits), one for red, one for green, and one for blue. The codes are preceeded by a pound sign and enclosed in double quotes. e.g. "#FFFFFF" is the RGB value for the color WHITE. You can look at the source of this HTML document for a real-life example...

The 216 number represents all possible combinations of RGB where each individual color takes on one of the six specific values 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, or 255. In hexadecimal these numbers are: 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, FF.
And 6*6*6 equals 216, thus the name.

In the color tables below, you may click on an RGB value to see another web page with that color as a background, showing text samples in each of the 216 colors. This makes it easy to pick a color scheme...