The 88x31 GIF Collection | Hacker News Reader

The 88x31 GIF Collection

cyber.dabamos.de

239 pointszanchey45 comments

For anyone wondering "Why 88x31?"

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of websites were hosted on Geocities, which was popular as it offered free hosting on one condition - you had to embed a small banner into your webpage advertising them. The banner image they provided was 88x31 pixels, and so many Geocities sites would include other external links as 88x31 images so that they matched the dimensions of the mandatory Geocities one.

I was about to ask the question, thanks for the explanation!

But why did Geocities use the 88×31 format?

https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31 (link warning: lots of 88×31 GIFs!) says it's likely because the "Netscape Now!" button was of that size.

But why was the Netscape Now button that size? We must go deeper

At the bottom of the stack, the answer is probably either "it fit perfectly in an 88x31 space between some other things on the first page it was used on" or "I drew a rectangle that looked right and didn't bother rounding the numbers".

As it turns out, if you put two horses side by side...

I think the parent refers to that which is a classic one: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-link-between-a-hor...

It's 88x31 GIFs all the way down.

But why [did GeoCities pick] 88x31? Weren’t they matching the size of the Netscape web badge?

468x60 was also a thing for banners back then

There's also: https://gifcities.org/

and I can't help but link to this cozy lil' gem https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Big blast of nostalgia from that Japanese pagoda image at the top.

It originated as a Commodore 64 320x200 image. Note how there are no color changes between 8x8 pixel blocks.

I forget the artist's first name, but I believe his last name was Sachs. He was a huge deal in 64 art in the 80's, and later transitioned to Amiga.

I think he did a fish tank screen saver, and I seem to recall a video game on the 64 where you flew flying saucers to destroy Washington, DC. Because he was an artist, the graphics were unlike anything else seen at the time on a home computer.

Did you mean ZX Spectrum? Because C64 didn't have any trouble showing multiple colors in 8x8 blocks.

C64 didn't have any trouble showing multiple colors in 8x8 blocks.

In high resolution mode it did, which is the 320x200. You could only have a single foreground color and a background color.

In the low resolution 160x200 mode you could have one background color and three foreground colors in a 4x8 square.

I was a computer artist back then, published in several Commodore magazines, and the first thing I had to decide when painting a scene was if I could get away with the 320x200 mode, or settle for 160x200 because I needed more colors closer together.

Thanks for the explanation. For some reason, I thought that limit only applied to C64 text mode, not graphics.

The 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer'[0] GIF triggers severe nostalgia.

IE was the dominant browser at the time, and these propaganda buttons just reinforced the idea that IE was the only browser you should be using. Still see the odd site saying 'Works best in Chrome' as if Chrome was the new IE.

Personally though, if your site is one of those annoying SPA (Single Page Apps) and doesn't work in Lynx[1], you're doing it wrong IMHO.

Nearly tempted to put a button on my sites saying: 'Best viewed in Lynx'.

[0] https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/bestviewed.gif

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

The Netscape banners do it for me, as the time when Netscape was dominant was a great time for me. The internet was a huge vault for me, and every time I dialed in I felt that rush. Every minute counted because we paid by the minute.

Netscape is also Mozilla's spiritual father.

Lynx didn't have JS support. Which was a blessing and a curse.

Recently enough to have been unacceptable, the director of our internal apps team decided to only support IE when they redid the intranet site. This, in a place that installs Firefox on all endpoints and proxy logs showing less than 50pct IE usage.

He was unamused when I started posting "screenshots" with "best viewed in ie" logos added.

To this day I have encountered several sites (sort of public, behind logins) that refuse to load if "Gecko" is in the user agent and display variations of "This site requires Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge to work. Please install one of these browsers and ensure it is up to date to proceed."

A user agent spoof extension solves the problem because there's actually nothing used that Firefox doesn't support. Maybe there was, one day, but someone forgot to keep up, or didn't want to.

This has happened for me within the last 3 months with both a widely known financial application provider rhyming with "I'm a twit" and an educational software provider rhyming vaguely with "Crack jorts"

Google's image search also supports passing "imagesize:WxH", like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize:88x31&tbm=isch

> 1011 requests | 9.3 MB transferred | 9.1 MB resources

I was going to warn about this, but then I realized that's probably not even half of the average modern web page size =)

Clearly this was the killer app QUIC needed to solve.

If they would just update the server to support HTTP2, it would be 99% there. Living far away from the server I could instantly tell that it was using HTTP/1.1, which was confirmed by looking at the dev tools.

Discussed in 2021:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624 (124 comments)

Did you find this link at the bottom of the blog that leaked TSA no fly list? Because that’s how I found the same site today. https://maia.crimew.gay/

Yes, same here

No, through the excellent b3ta newsletter

Here's a search of 88x31 gifs from CDs, disks, and FTP sites on archive.org as indexed by discmaster.textfiles.com: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?widthMin=88&heightMin...

If you extend the range by 1px to be 87x30 to 88x32 you double the amount of results and get those images that are off by 1px: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?family=image&widthMin...

Ugh stop it HN, I can only handle so much nostalgia! FYI, in Japan there's a sunset of websites that are meant for a Japanese only audience and the pages are still designed in 'ol faithful web 1.0 designs.

That's interesting, I recently had a discussion about how Japan has a bit of a tendency to hang on to fashion for much longer, but applied to music. Like certain styles of metal being popular after decline in the west, 90s Animes with soundtracks that sounded like 80s AOR/R&B, or even 80s-pointy-guitars being used by Japanese indie bands.

And not in a bad way, but more in a "fashion isn't as fleeting in Japan". Also it seems that the new and the old are able to coexist in the mainstream there, more than in the West. But that's of course just an impression, I might be wrong.

You're not wrong at all. It's also out of necessity since most development tools and documentation is EN to JP. Its hard for them to find answers since everything is either in English or outdated.

Regardless, the mentality of ofjit ain't broke don't fix it is well engrained in J culture. It's something that I admire of the Japanese.

We need to bring back the 88x31 gifs! What's missing from the Internet these days is a little bit of heart, and a little bit of soul. All these algorithms curating our content and the people tweaking their content so that the algorithm will rank it better is making the Internet a little less wholesome by the day.

Well with today's resolutions, we probably need to pick a higher resolution. We could upscale by 150% (132*47)

Such a fun way to show all your alliances. AMD, Netscape, your domain provider, your hosting company, a Linux penguin...

Creator should consider combining those that are still or share the same number of frames into a single image, or atleast an image that combines ~100 so that its a single web request, then splice them using CSS.

This is sort of tone deaf considering the context of the 88x31 gif.

The 88x31 GIF Collection - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624 - June 2021 (124 comments)

Seeing a thousand of those images on a single page captures the ‘90s internet. All it lacks is the giant throbbing pulsating ‘N’ up in the corner.

All those banners would make an epic poster :O

These look small on my setup. They used to be displayed 1:1 with low-dpi screen pixels, no scaling.

Back in the day how they use to animate this buttons? CSS?

They're animated GIFs, which were an extension of the longstanding format and predate CSS

The WinZip 7 and Sexy Brittney Spears ones really take me back!

Don't tell me you wouldn't like the web to be, for a couple of hours a day, as it was back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com