Web Development Tools


Browser Window Ruler -

Use this page to resize your browser window, to simulate various viewing environments. You can also measure the area your own page occupies, by setting http://www.mis2.udel.edu/april/webtools/ruler.gif as your page's background.

Browser-Safe Color Palette -

These are the 216 colors that are common to most system palettes, and will display relatively the same regardless of environment. They are the colors recommended for setting background and text colors, as well as for optimizing some kinds of web images (such as illustrations containing flat areas of color). A browser-safe color can be recognized by its hexadecimal number, which only contains combinations of 00,33,66,99,CC, or FF.

HTML Text Color Names -

This is a chart of text color names that may be used in HTML. Except for the group of colors at the top of the page, these colors are NOT in the 216 color palette shown in the page above. Their use is NOT recommended, but they are here for reference, should one choose to use them.

"Hybrid-Safe" Colors -

This is a small library of swatches that can be used to simulate a solid color not found in the 216-color palette. They can be used as tiled background images to simulate a solid-color background, or the pattern can be used as a fill in an illustration when the desired color is not browser-safe. More of these swatches will be added as they are needed.

Useful Sites

• Browser Offsets: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
  Useful article about browser offset, the amount of horizontal and vertical space that is inserted so that you cannot position a graphic in the extreme top left of a page. In general, offset ranges from 8 to 20 pixels vertically and 8 to 10 pixels horizontally.
  
  
• Tiling Images with Tables and Tiling Images with Tables: Part 2
  Tutorial on how to set up borderless tables so that tiled images can be aligned seamlessly.
  
  
• Lynda Weinman's Site and the Creating Killer Web Sites Site
  The two books that have been proclaimed the definitive guides to web design are by Lynda Weinman and David Siegel. These two sites are the companions to their respective books.