Oh my goodness, thank you! I have been searching for a source of the small icons as an example to show the computing classes I lecture, and I finally found my rotating favorite one! https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/msntbciis.gif
Thank you so much - on the flip side, my students may dislike you because they're going to get a lecture on how the web used to be!
My favorite one I think is the Internet Explorer/Google Chrome "Same shit different - " one, because it's obviously recent and somehow iconic of the sort of person who reminisces about the old web, and clearly narrowcasting to such people.
Yeah, I knew what they were but I'd never heard them described as "88x31 buttons," even back in the early 00s, so I had no idea what this article was going on about at first.
Did you not read "Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements spanning over 25 years:" followed by links to different galleries? Is clicking a link all that hard? It lets the reader browse examples at their own pace. I thought this was HN, not TikTok.
Love how the top comment right now is from someone who didn't read the second paragraph in the article, where it links to a bunch of sites with 88x31 buttons.
I actually did click through the links to find those, and I was annoyed that I had to do that instead of having at least one rendered inline in the article.
It even has some examples of other size images inline, but none of the titular 88x31 buttons. I found it odd.
I clicked through a couple of those pages, didn't see any obvious buttons and even if I did, kind of ambiguous which ones are the right size without checking.
This brings me back to my N64 Perfect Dark fansite webmaster-days. I wonder if there's a similar article detailing another cultural internet phenomenon; the tech-forum signatures.
For example; I remember the heyday of the MadOnion forums (the makers of 3D Mark, before they changed their name to Futuremark) and their users having these massive information-dense signature banners showcasing their PC-specs, 3D-mark scores, OC-info, etc.) with and without animations. Even at the time I remember thinking some of them were over the top and distracting, but people really put their hearts into making those things and it took some skill to make a really good one.
> "No Alteration Allowed - The Netscape Now button must not be altered in ANY way. Do not shrink it; take it apart; change its proportions, color, or font; or otherwise alter it from the Netscape-supplied version." did little to discourage people and probably outright encouraged them just for spite - y'know because the Internet.
Colbert had Lawrence Lessig on his show and (obv in-character) said something along the lines of
> I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some great dance beat.
> I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some great dance beat.
For some reason, this makes me think of Strong Bad. Probably because of the sbemail "sibbie", in which The Cheat does drop a phat beat under Strong Bad's reading of the email, much to the latter's consternation.
Except that only his character was Streisand-ing it; Colbert-the-person thought it would be hilarious to slyly encourage people to remix a spoken interview with a "great dance beat" (and, at the time, it kind of was)
I think he is equating stern copyright notices to somebody making a strong statement about what annoys them. As if to say “so what”, and the boom in “unapproved” 88x31 pics demonstrates this
I love the 88x31 buttons to friends sites the most. From this blog post, I was able to follow ~10 links and end up on my own homepage. I think that’s beautiful.
I suspect the size hung around for a while for a couple of reasons.
The physical size (on screen) didn't vary by much. If I recall correctly, 72 to 120 dpi dominated until the introduction of Retina/HiDPI displays, and 120 dpi was pushing the limit since scaling wasn't really a thing. (When it was a thing, it tended to be handled by applications where it was important, such as desktop publishing/graphics design applications, and it only extended to the content area.)
Add that to the purpose of these buttons: they were intended to be unobtrusive messages about which browsers were supported, or which browser the site owner prefered. Going bigger would not have much of a point. (That said, they were as obtrusive as heck to those of us using unsupported browsers!)
The change from Netscape saying the official dimensions are 88x32 to everyone using 88x31 seems worthy of more investigation. The idea that Netscape made the unofficial one 31 instead of 32 as a way to tell who was official or not doesn't seem very likely to me.
Not as far as anyone is aware. There were massive archiving efforts running leading up to the shutdown. One archive reproduced the directory tree and most GeoCities links could be replaced with reocities and simply worked.
I think the main bulk of the archives for slurped into the internet archive. I don't know if any of the independent GeoCities archives are still online, but everything that was saved should be in the IA by now.
The Agora road forum (a bunch of syntheave plus retired 4channers plus paranormal conspiracists and their dark web adjacent denizens with some retrofuturist early web revival themes) uses these buttons and calls them gangtags though the sizes are not always 88x31. It's nice to see the creativity of the new ones each months.
Am I missing something? I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock and this site still looks totally fine — great even. I love the colors. There are like seven example banners on the entire page, three icons for navigation, and mostly text.
When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.
I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to read.
Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really), is rock solid.
I can read the site but it is not as easy as possible for me and let's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why not replicate that in a web page?
Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.
Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not just their mates.
A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white backgrounds with black text, when the technology became available, to imitate the paper and documents that people were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a light bulb.
White text on a black background in print is indeed harder to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
> When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
Magazines almost always have their text in thin columns, because long lines are difficult to follow. Books are also typically 1/3th the width of a typical computer screen for the same reason.
Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.
A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you will note that their readers have a book shape.
Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
> Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
I use HN in a half window, so the text is roughly the same width as the website here.
Long lines aren't that difficult to follow. And for those who find it so, they can just resize their browser window. Meanwhile I have to go mess with the dev console on half the sites I visit these days because they insist on having text in a 2-inch wide column. That is a way worse problem.
Why are there zero examples of 88x31 buttons in this article?
Here are a few samples https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
Oh my goodness, thank you! I have been searching for a source of the small icons as an example to show the computing classes I lecture, and I finally found my rotating favorite one! https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/msntbciis.gif
Thank you so much - on the flip side, my students may dislike you because they're going to get a lecture on how the web used to be!
My favorite one I think is the Internet Explorer/Google Chrome "Same shit different - " one, because it's obviously recent and somehow iconic of the sort of person who reminisces about the old web, and clearly narrowcasting to such people.
"a few"
*saturates my Gigabit pipe*
At first I read this as a typo for the 88c31 micro-controller that is used in buttons.
My stock answer was, "Good point, the 88c31 seems overkill for a button. But... AI isn't great for detecting button pushes."
Then, I realized the page was just a rant about web buttons and didn't actually show example web buttons.
Or even an explanation of what the term means
Yeah, I knew what they were but I'd never heard them described as "88x31 buttons," even back in the early 00s, so I had no idea what this article was going on about at first.
The first sentence contains a footnote (1) with links to a bunch of examples.
the worst kind of correct
I would guess that the author simply tacitly assumed that any reader would have the general look of 88x31 buttons etched in their visual memory.
This vagueness and assumed context seems so common nowadays… you’re supposed to be in the know already and it’s gauche to ask…
The first paragraph of the article links to the buttons.
> Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements spanning over 25 years:
> (…)
> They all feature 88x31 buttons in some capacity and those buttons reflect the website and it's designer in some way.
I disagree, they all feature _multiple_ elements and it's only obvious what the 88x31 button is if you already know.
88 x 31 pixels? I had a hard time grasping, what the author is talking about. Especially since he shows large banners, not smaller buttons.
lol, that's what I was thinking.
That and how buttons from 30 years ago work with 4k monitors.
Ha, opened the comments to say exactly this. Truly infuriating.
Did you not read "Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements spanning over 25 years:" followed by links to different galleries? Is clicking a link all that hard? It lets the reader browse examples at their own pace. I thought this was HN, not TikTok.
Yes but what is it - they are just elements - no description of what they are.
Love how the top comment right now is from someone who didn't read the second paragraph in the article, where it links to a bunch of sites with 88x31 buttons.
I actually did click through the links to find those, and I was annoyed that I had to do that instead of having at least one rendered inline in the article.
It even has some examples of other size images inline, but none of the titular 88x31 buttons. I found it odd.
I clicked through a couple of those pages, didn't see any obvious buttons and even if I did, kind of ambiguous which ones are the right size without checking.
Article really could have used an example or two.
This brings me back to my N64 Perfect Dark fansite webmaster-days. I wonder if there's a similar article detailing another cultural internet phenomenon; the tech-forum signatures.
For example; I remember the heyday of the MadOnion forums (the makers of 3D Mark, before they changed their name to Futuremark) and their users having these massive information-dense signature banners showcasing their PC-specs, 3D-mark scores, OC-info, etc.) with and without animations. Even at the time I remember thinking some of them were over the top and distracting, but people really put their hearts into making those things and it took some skill to make a really good one.
> "No Alteration Allowed - The Netscape Now button must not be altered in ANY way. Do not shrink it; take it apart; change its proportions, color, or font; or otherwise alter it from the Netscape-supplied version." did little to discourage people and probably outright encouraged them just for spite - y'know because the Internet.
Colbert had Lawrence Lessig on his show and (obv in-character) said something along the lines of
> I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some great dance beat.
so did anyone actually remix this, I wonder?
yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvvhDngERXo
with a followup remix of the episode where he discussed this remix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=125D2DTMyGg
> I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some great dance beat.
For some reason, this makes me think of Strong Bad. Probably because of the sbemail "sibbie", in which The Cheat does drop a phat beat under Strong Bad's reading of the email, much to the latter's consternation.
https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/76-sibbie
Can you explain this to me? I don't know what any of this means.
Consider it related to the Streisand effect or reverse psychology concepts.
Except that only his character was Streisand-ing it; Colbert-the-person thought it would be hilarious to slyly encourage people to remix a spoken interview with a "great dance beat" (and, at the time, it kind of was)
I think he is equating stern copyright notices to somebody making a strong statement about what annoys them. As if to say “so what”, and the boom in “unapproved” 88x31 pics demonstrates this
Kinda seems like an article like this should have some pictures of this button?
I love the 88x31 buttons to friends sites the most. From this blog post, I was able to follow ~10 links and end up on my own homepage. I think that’s beautiful.
I suspect the size hung around for a while for a couple of reasons.
The physical size (on screen) didn't vary by much. If I recall correctly, 72 to 120 dpi dominated until the introduction of Retina/HiDPI displays, and 120 dpi was pushing the limit since scaling wasn't really a thing. (When it was a thing, it tended to be handled by applications where it was important, such as desktop publishing/graphics design applications, and it only extended to the content area.)
Add that to the purpose of these buttons: they were intended to be unobtrusive messages about which browsers were supported, or which browser the site owner prefered. Going bigger would not have much of a point. (That said, they were as obtrusive as heck to those of us using unsupported browsers!)
I made 88x31 buttons for my homepage[1] a few weeks ago. Phone users will have to rotate to landscape to see them.
[1]: https://webb.page/
The change from Netscape saying the official dimensions are 88x32 to everyone using 88x31 seems worthy of more investigation. The idea that Netscape made the unofficial one 31 instead of 32 as a way to tell who was official or not doesn't seem very likely to me.
Clicking the links and seeing some of those old sites really gives ahit of nostalgia.
Really good info in the article, enjoyed the read - but as others mentioned, some pictures would have been nice
I called it pieces of flair: https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2024-04-26-how-...
Related: some ex-Geocities employee somewhere must have a back up of all those sites?
https://theoldnet.com, scroll down.
Not as far as anyone is aware. There were massive archiving efforts running leading up to the shutdown. One archive reproduced the directory tree and most GeoCities links could be replaced with reocities and simply worked.
I think the main bulk of the archives for slurped into the internet archive. I don't know if any of the independent GeoCities archives are still online, but everything that was saved should be in the IA by now.
The Agora road forum (a bunch of syntheave plus retired 4channers plus paranormal conspiracists and their dark web adjacent denizens with some retrofuturist early web revival themes) uses these buttons and calls them gangtags though the sizes are not always 88x31. It's nice to see the creativity of the new ones each months.
Title should really mention "pixels, on webpages".
Indeed. I was curious about a 88x31 matrix of buttons.
Ahhh, now I get what Reader Mode is for.
I grew up with Badgers flying overhead and later on the blink tag and yet this is worse!
Am I missing something? I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock and this site still looks totally fine — great even. I love the colors. There are like seven example banners on the entire page, three icons for navigation, and mostly text.
Or are you talking about some of the example sites the article links to like http://thombs.com/Dann_1996-06/noframes.htm in which case yeah I get it lol
"I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock"
When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.
I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to read.
Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really), is rock solid.
I can read the site but it is not as easy as possible for me and let's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why not replicate that in a web page?
Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.
Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not just their mates.
A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white backgrounds with black text, when the technology became available, to imitate the paper and documents that people were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a light bulb.
White text on a black background in print is indeed harder to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
> When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
Magazines almost always have their text in thin columns, because long lines are difficult to follow. Books are also typically 1/3th the width of a typical computer screen for the same reason.
Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.
A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you will note that their readers have a book shape.
Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
> Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
I use HN in a half window, so the text is roughly the same width as the website here.
Long lines aren't that difficult to follow. And for those who find it so, they can just resize their browser window. Meanwhile I have to go mess with the dev console on half the sites I visit these days because they insist on having text in a 2-inch wide column. That is a way worse problem.
Too bad Wikipedia made their site less accessible (and less readable) with the recent redesign.
I don't know, to me the text that's spanning the entire width of the monitor is less accessible than a column with more sensible width.
Sadly firefox's reader mode still renders it in a thin strip of text. Granted it's in a readable font that way, but still.
it's not even a golden rectangle :)