The use of color to enhance images on the Internet has brought both positive and negative aspects. The temptation to use as many colors as possible from, say, a possible 24-bit palette of over 16 million colors can bring its own problems, not to mention an increase in download times.

The web - safe palette of some 216 colors should give a wide enough choice for most purposes. The utilisation of GIFs provides a source of color images suitable for most online graphics purposes including animation although the animated GIF below benefits in terms of quality and smoothness from its transformation into a Shockwave movie, which has a file size of only 10 KB.
Click on the image to play the Shockwave version.