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Comment by DismantleMars | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

468x60 was also a thing for banners back then

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

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

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