Background colors on PCs

[John Pearce]

Kevin Justie has gotten some complaints from PC users who saw his page's 
background as "full of dots".

Kevin, do you know what kind of graphics system the PC users have -- SVGA,
VGA, etc?  Plain ol' VGA in "hi-res" mode (640x480) only puts 16 colors on
the screen at a time.  The 000000 to FFFFFF color scheme handles 16^6 or
16 million colors.  Windows does its best to emulate them, including
dithering colors together if need be.  In 16 color VGA mode, Windows has
to get pretty clever to emulate 16 million colors, and that's what I think
your dots are. 

If you really want to avoid dithering on VGA stations, you'll need to pick
colors that map directly onto the Windows default 16 color palette.  I'm
not sure it's worth it.  Here at the UW Health Sciences Library Microlab,
we let people know not to expect much from Netscape on our old VGA 386s,
since most scanned images need 256 or more colors. 

I programmed graphics for while back when VGA was the hot new thing.  
Sigh... 

John Pearce
University of Washington
Health Sciences Library Microlab