About this resource

Contents The "web-safe" palette Tool overview Tool short-cuts Palette layouts Tool calculations

How it started

The Colour Selector was first launched in Dec 1996 and has been created by Paola Kathuria. I'd generated background and text test pages for my own use, thought that other people may find them useful and so made them available online.

When I first started developing web sites, page colour, text colour and tiles weren't part of the HTML specification or the non-standard unofficial extensions to HTML. As new tags were introduced, I noticed how browsers dealt with them and added my observations to a page of tricks and tips (for instance, from Netscape 3, I think, bgcolor was displayed first and the page tile last, hence my tip to always use bgcolor with tiles).

What it is built with

From 1996 to April 2001, the Colour Selector existed as simple HTML web pages.

In April 2001, the Text previewer was redeveloped in LML; a month later, the whole resource was converted to LML (LML is a scripting language like PHP but pre-dates it).

The Colour Selector has been designed within some self-imposed limitations because I think that, where a reasonable solution exists in standard HTML, a web site shouldn't depend on:

• browser make (e.g., IE, Netscape or Opera);
• browser version (e.g., version 3 or 6);
• config options (JavaScript, Java, images, CSS on/off);
• plug-ins (e.g., Flash);
• screen size or browser width;
• number of colours that can be displayed (256 or more).

Feedback

I've been compiling a list of my own ideas for new Colour Selector features but I'm always happy to receive feedback and suggestions from the people who use it. Mail me at paola@limov.com. Thanks.

Paola Kathuria