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Comment by bbrks | Hacker News Reader

For those who may be wondering why 88x31px?

https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a...

>> At this point in time the largest provider of personal hosting was GeoCities. In order to improve brand awareness, they required that all free hosting users have a link back to GeoCities somewhere on the page. They helpfully provided default banners for these links at - you guessed it - the dimensions of 88x31

But that doesn't really explain why 83x31 was chosen by Geocities

It fit the font they chose. The designer probably didn't care how many pixels were in the image so long as it looked ok on their screen.

My guess is that the creator of the first image didn't have an exact size in mind so when they were doodling in the bitmap editor it just happened to come out to that size and was trimmed accordingly. And then future images were made to fit.

Still not explaining "why", but Wikipedia suggests that it was part of a list of standardized sizes, this one being a "micro bar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner#Standard_sizes

It probably became a standard after it got popular.

"why one place picked something" doesn't require special reasoning like "why everyone picked something" does.

I know, but I was hoping for something like "you could fit 4 of the buttons in a browser window, on a 640x480 screen" (the standard of the time)

I'd say 800x600 was more prevalent in 1995. You could get real 60 Hz in this mode on most monitors, which looked much better on a CRT than lower refresh rates. Cheap VGA cards could not pull this trick at 1024x768, though, and it flickered painfully.

https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html

Why 88 by 31, anyway? Who started this? A Quora poster speculates GeoCities started this trend when they provided 88x31 GeoCities buttons for their users, but the contemporary source she references actually says the trend was started by Netscape.

I also associate that button very strongly with Netscape. I was surprised to not see one which had the Netscape logo on it, only a "Netscape Now" button was there among other "Now" buttons.

I wonder if the 31px height was from the height of the logo on the right of the address bar, the one which was animated. I don't know which height it was, but it could match.

The GIFs are displayed alphabetically by filename, and are paginated. The "N" files show up on the third page:

http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html

and it links to the "related question" https://www.quora.com/Around-when-did-the-88x31-for-website-...

which seems like an AI misinterpretation of the question, as it goes back to the prehistoric

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