Background Colors

[Kevin Justie]

Thank you to everyone who offered assistance with our background color
problem.  Only two respondents of 14 said they saw dots, so, as we
suspected, it isn't a major problem.

The ultimate, and fortunately, the easiest, solution was to upgrade to
Netscape 2.0 (we were on 1.1N).  This made everything look exactly as it
does on a Mac.

I thought a summary of the other solutions that were suggested would prove
useful for anyone else who might be experiencing similar problems.  These
didn't work for us, but they all make sense and might work in other
situations:

1.  "Netscape (presumably versions earlier than 2) uses a 216 color palette
under 8 bit mode, which means that each of the rgb colors must be 00, 33,
66, 99, CC or FF."  Our blue-green is 009999, so this wasn't the cause of
our problem.

2.  "Use the windows color 408080", which is very close to our blue-green.
While this color did displayed correctly, the *transparent* parts of our
gifs then turned to a different color (why?).

3.  "Use some of the color charts available online when selecting colors"
(http://www.phoenix.net/~jacobson/rgb.html,
http://www.missouri.edu/~c588349/colormaker.html).  I did use these, on a
Mac,  when we were setting up our site, but while the gifs on these pages
display the colors correctly on the PC (as do our gifs), using the
identical color as a background still didn't work.

4.  "In the settings, change how the colors are dithered."  This didn't
have any effect.




Kevin Justie
Head of Technical and Automated Services
Morton Grove Public Library
Morton Grove, IL
(847) 965-4220
kjustie at mgk.nslsilus.org
http://www.nslsilus.org/mgkhome/
Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect
offical Library policy.