Many of the dialog boxes and Property inspectors in Dreamweaver have a color box, which opens a color palette. Use the color palette to choose a color for an element.
To choose a color in Dreamweaver:
| 1 | Choose a color box in any dialog box or Property inspector. |
| 2 | To choose a color, do one of the following: |
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Use the eyedropper to select a color swatch from the palette. All colors in the palette are web safe. |
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Use the eyedropper to pick up a color anywhere on the desktop. |
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Click the Web-safe Eyedropper button to limit the selection to web-safe colors. When this option is enabled, the selected color snaps to the closest web-safe color. |
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Click the Eraser button to clear the current color without choosing a different color. |
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Click the Palette button to open the system color picker. These colors are not limited to web-safe colors. |
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In HTML, colors are expressed as either hexadecimal values (for example, #FF0000) or as color names (red). The colors that are common to Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer on both Windows and Macintosh systems when running in 256-color mode are called web safe. The conventional wisdom is that there are 216 common colors, and that any hexadecimal value that combines the pairs 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, or FF (RGB values 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255, respectively) represents a web-safe color.
Testing, however, reveals that there are only 212 web-safe colors. Internet Explorer on Windows does not correctly render the colors #0033FF (0,51,255), #3300FF (51,0,255), #00FF33 (0,255,51), and #33FF00 (51,255,0).
All of the color pickers in Dreamweaver use the 212-color web-safe palette; selecting a color from the palette displays the color's hexadecimal value. While the four colors mentioned previously are not in the Dreamweaver web-safe palette, you can edit the hexadecimal value in any color field by hand if you want to use them.
To choose a color outside the web-safe range, click the Palette button in the lower right corner to open the system color picker.
UNIX versions of Navigator use a different color palette than the Windows and Macintosh versions. If you are developing exclusively for UNIX machines (or your target audience is Windows or Macintosh users with 24-bit monitors and UNIX users with 8-bit monitors), consider using hexadecimal values that combine the pairs 00, 40, 80, BF, or FF, which produce web-safe colors on the SunOS.