web safe colors req'd?

I am jsut curious to whether it is that important to use the web safe colors when designing a web site. Obviously they limit the look and feel of the site. The reason that I ask is that on the occasion I find a web site with a cool color scheme that after checking the colors I find that the colors used are not "web safe" at all. So now days is it that important to use the websafe colors such as #003366, #336699 etc. Usually the sites that a person designs now days are for people that would have a relatively recent computer.

Thanks for the input.

I always use this online tool when determining color schemes:
http://www.zspc.com/color/index-e.html

I generally consider the cross-platform and color value literals palletes from this tool to be safe, and have yet to run into issues w/ any of the modern browsers (Mozilla, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Safari, Omniweb, iCab, Netscape v6/7, msie, etc).

I no longer develop with any consideration towards Netscape versions 4.x and under, so I can't advise you there.

so do you stick to the color palette with only 216 colors? I am wondering if it is safe to use the color palette that offers the 16.7 million colors.

The color palette on that site are generally the colors that I work with, but it is sometimes hard to get what you want with the limited number of colors

Well, like I said, I use the 216 plus the color value literals, which gives me a total of 354 colors to select from.

Really, though, this is only for CSS elements; I don't worry about these restrictions when designing graphics. For CSS, 354 is all I've ever needed.

I have never tried to use the color literals. I will try them out, they provide a few new colors so that might help a lot.

Thanks