I posted this in the thread a bout the Blues Bar layout, but I wasn't sure if people saw it since everybody had pretty much already checked out the layout itself. Since I'm really interested in whether this works, I'm making it its own thread.

(For those who don't want to read the whole post, the underlying question for this thread is this: Does using a websafe color for your movie background eliminate any color-matching problems between the movie and html background colors?)

On one computer, I had a problem with the html background color not matching my movie's background color even though both had the same numeric code (in this case #300060). This resulted in a border effect I didn't want. It turned out that the computer on which I observed the problem was set to 16 bit (so-called "high") color instead of 24 bit (so-called "true") color. Changing the setting to 24 bit color fixed the problem. Here's the original layout url:

http://demo.voikos.com/animation/alm...itarbig97.html


But that got me thinking about all of those other people out there with less than true color. So I tried an experiment.

The original background color in the layout is #300060. It turns out that this is not on the web safe pallette. So I changed the color to a websafe one fairly close to what I wanted, in this case #000066. With this setting, I cannot see the border effect on my parents' computer (or on mine for that matter) even if the setting is high color instead of true. So maybe one solution is to use websafe colors for backgrounds when you're worried about this border effect. But before I get too excited, I thought I would post this version for others to view at high color settings and see if in fact it really does solve the problem.

http://demo.voikos.com/animation/alm...uitarsafe.html

For those of you still with me and wondering why I didn't try #330066, actually I did. I did it, though, before actually checking the websafe pallette and -- if I'm not missing something -- this value isn't on there. But this color does cause less of a border effect at high settings, I guess because it's closer to being websafe than the original color. Here's the url for that one for anyone who wants to compare:

http://demo.voikos.com/animation/alm...tarbig97b.html

I'm interested in hearing from anybody who has time to see if the websafe approach to background colors really does work. Though it presents a limited palette, it does (assuming that it works) open up some design and layout freedom, so it might be a good trade.