by Amy Cowen

Last month, we walked through the virtues of customizing your coding environment with reusable chunks of code -- snippets. Next to snippets, the HomeSite feature most useful for your individual sites is the customizable palette.

It's great that HomeSite comes with several built-in palettes (e.g., Named Colors, Safety Palette, Windows 16 Colors). You can easily switch back and forth between these palettes, depending upon your needs.

Even better is the fact that you can build your own palettes. So, if you've got a site that uses #6600FF, #9900FF, #FFCC00, #FF9900, #FF6600 as primary colors in its visual elements, then you're going to want to use those same colors in your HTML formatting. With HomeSite, you can create a palette of colors just for that site.

A smaller, targeted palette is much easier to use than a palette of all 216 Netscape colors. And, if you've got the palette of hex colors that match your graphics, you won't have to weed through the larger palettes to figure out which purple it is that matches your site color.

Making a Palette
When you've got the palette strip visible, you can access other palettes, or create new ones, via the yellow gear icon that sits to the left of the palette strip at the bottom of the HomeSite window.

Clicking the "Open palette" icon will allow you to choose one of the existing palettes, "edit" one of the existing palettes, or create a "new" palette. From the window that pops up (shown here), you can either enter the RGB values, enter the hexadecimal code, or use the dropper to pick up a color from the full spectrum.

Clearly, it's smarter HTML to have the exact RGB value or hex code for a Web-friendly color. You can use an online clut to get the color code, or you can get the RBG values directly from Photoshop. After you fill in the value, the color you've entered shows up as a swatch under "Current Color." If it's the right one, click "add," and it appears in the right hand window. It's now a part of your palette.

After you are finished entering colors, click "Save." You'll be prompted to name the palette. It then appears in the available palettes window, and you can switch to it whenever you're working on that site.

While adding colors is easy, you have to go a few extra steps to delete colors, so, be careful!

If you do mess up, or if it really bugs you that you've got three blues in your palette that you added when you were designing the site but that you aren't using in the final version of the site, you can modify the .pal file that is stored in the "Palettes" subdirectory of your HomeSite program directory.

Just browse to the directory and set the open "Files of Type" box to "All Files." You'll see the list of available palettes. Select the one you want to edit and hit "open."

The text file that appears contains the color codes, rgb, for the palette. You can delete any of these and re-save the palette.

The easiest procedure is to open the palette you're going to edit so that it's the "active" palette at the bottom of your screen. This way you can see the colors. Then open the .pal file.

If it's the fourth color in the palette that you want to delete, just delete the fourth RGB code in the .pal file.

After you resave the .pal file, you'll have to re-select the palette to update it. Just click the "Open Palette" button and double-click the palette name.

A World of HTML Color
Using palettes can be a major time saver, and you'll notice how much easier it is to set your next headline, background color, or BODY tag once you've got your palettes established!

Amy Cowen is a Web developer and a freelance contributor to the Allaire DevCenter

Copyright; Hewlett-Packard Company, 1998.
Presented with permission from HP E Business Magazine August 1998 / Issue #22 / E Talks Tech