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The 88x31 GIF Collection
- bbrks 5y agoFor those who may be wondering why 88x31px? https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a-standard-for-a-website-button https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a...
- bluedino 5y ago>> 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
- zamadatix 5y ago"why one place picked something" doesn't require special reasoning like "why everyone picked something" does.
- bluedino 5y agoI 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)
- nine_k 5y agoI'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.
- jandrese 5y agoIt 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.
- sverhagen 5y agoStill 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner#Standard_sizes
- sedatk 5y agoIt probably became a standard after it got popular.
- donio 5y agoMy 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.
- tpmx 5y agohttps://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html 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.
- qwertox 5y agoI 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.
- duskwuff 5y agoThe 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 http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html
- tda 5y agoand it links to the "related question" https://www.quora.com/Around-when-did-the-88x31-for-website-buttons-become-a-standard-size 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
- junon 5y agoThis takes me back to the days of forum signatures, planetrenders.com, pixel fonts with 1px strokes, making emoticons (not emojis) on deviantArt, BBCode and making long-winded posts on VBulletin/PhpBB boards with the top three posts "reserved for later use". Man I wish I could go back.
- bluedino 5y ago"Under Construction" images, rotating skull and fire GIFs...
- klaussilveira 5y ago> pixel fonts with 1px strokes Nostalgia kicked in hard.
- grishka 5y agoUserbars!
- _def 5y agoI completely forgot about them! Just looked at a bunch of them, they (and forum signatures in general) were kind of awesome.
- 5y ago
- cmg 5y agoFair warning: Page 1 transfers about 8.3MB with 1,000+ HTTP requests. And will likely bring back memories of the 90s.
- GloriousKoji 5y agoSo... on par with any modern website (minus the 90s)?
- cmg 5y agoAs theandrewbailey said, it would absolutely benefit from HTTP/2 - it took about 30 seconds to complete on my fast cable connection on a laptop.
- chrismorgan 5y agoAnd with higher latency it’s even worse: from Australia, latency to the server was over 350ms (going the long way round, via the USA, for some reason), and it took 80 seconds to load. With HTTP/2, it could have taken as little as two seconds to load, and I’d expect it to take less than eight seconds.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoImagine loading this page in the 90s though! One new HTTP connection at a time, a full TCP handshake. Maybe if you were lucky you were using Netscape which would load up to 4 resources at once!
- chrisco255 5y ago8MB would take all night on my 2400 baud modem.
- cyberge99 5y agoWe were hacking back then too. pipelining:true (Not really a hack, but a lesser known optimization)
- pcan77 5y agoI miss this version of the internet :( Everything is so boring now.
- xnx 5y agoFor anyone nostalgic for this type of old/weird internet, you should check out TikTok before it becomes too commercial/formalized. Still a lot of weird/random/raw stuff on there.
- unicornporn 5y agoI'm sincerely hoping that was a sarcastic comment.
- ExtraServings 5y agoThey should have built the site in Tailwind...
- Nadya 5y agoIt's harder to find but it still exists. The hardest part is finding the retroscape <communities> rather than individuals/people. For example, I can browse a lot of retro-ish early 2000's design sites on Neocities but it is difficult to call it much of a community. Same thing with mmm.page. https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse and recently-posted-to-HN https://mmm.page/xh.inspiring https://mmm.page/xh.inspiring I'd love to find (or even make) a community for people who still enjoy the aesthetic of the amateur-crafted web.
- have_faith 5y agoTry wiby.org, hit 'surprise me' a few times.
- grae_QED 5y agoGo to https://www.wiby.me https://www.wiby.me Its a search engine that only indexes minimalist websites. Everything on there looks like its from the 90's.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eat_veggies 5y agoIt's so wonderful seeing the images slowly pop into existence like that!
- dmd 5y agoWhat do you mean? They all appeared at once for me.
- duskwuff 5y agoWow, that is quite the variety of banners. Everything from (unironic) "Netscape Now" animations and RealPlayer banners to Discord and Mastodon promos.
- fhw8234 5y agoNice
- treesknees 5y agoI still have a collection of these 88x31 GIFs from my own websites back in the day. I never ran anything worth sharing with anyone else nowadays but it was pretty fun as a kid trying to build up services and hosting. There was a whole network of people trading "affiliate" banners, linking back and forth to each other's websites. Good times!
- ozaark 5y agoI was surprised the list has a couple affiliates of sites I used to run as a kid. It was one of the first ways I would navigate within a network of sites without having to use an often clunky search browsing experience at the time. Definitely nostalgia inducing.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoOh wow. I remember writing my first website and coveting those little banners. All the real websites had them outline their community associations and capabilities. Oh, my website is just a bit of text in some awful arrangement of neon colours that work in every browser? Better have an animated badge for each browser so that the people know, because the people must know! Excellent find!
- deaddodo 5y agoYeah, and you don't get the real effect of them outside of 800x600 or 1024x768. They look small here, but were relatively large on pages back then.
- crocal 5y agoIt’s so useless it’s needed.
- runawaybottle 5y agoToday’s dose of memberberries.
- GIFnotGIF 5y agonice!
- bastardoperator 5y agoI miss these days, thanks for sharing.
- pkulak 5y agoThat Covid-19 one sure was prescient.
- Minor49er 5y agoI'd be more nostalgiac for these if Neocities pages didn't continue the trend of creating and sharing them. The bottom of this page offers a common example: https://personally-comfy.neocities.org/ https://personally-comfy.neocities.org/
- mckeed 5y agoI saw digital blasphemy on there. I checked and it still exists and he's still updating!
- allenu 5y agoI was surprised to not find any X10 ads in there, but I guess they just never did small GIFs. Some of their examples from back in the day http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoInterestingly all of those images seem to be for their camera products. But long before those, X10 sold remote control systems that switched devices on/off over in-home electrical wiring (using the independent X10 protocol). The reliability of these systems were pretty bad as I recall. They offered something like 16 channels with various management devices that allowed for complicated scheduling of device switching.
- allenu 5y agoHeh, I remember those. I had my first internship around that time and one of the made-up jobs my boss at the time had me do was look into those switches. Another intern told me he just wanted someone to look into it since he wanted to try using them on his own home. :)
- anonymousiam 5y agoX10 was the first real home automation standard. The protocol was subject to interference and poor propagation, and did not use any EDAC or acknowledgement so it was pretty unreliable. It was still pretty useful for some things, and X10 devices are still being sold.
- pjc50 5y agoThe technology may have been fine. The advertising was insanely ubiquitous, in a way rarely seen since. Maybe Evony?
- twic 5y agoThose ads were annoying enough that Kompressor wrote a song about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs
- godot 5y agoOh man, seeing "88x31" really takes me back. Internet Explorer and Netscape buttons were all the rage to put on your web site. I remember making some 88x31 buttons/logos myself too. I know it's nostalgia talking but it truly was the good old days of the web to me.
- uncomputation 5y agoThis page is a great example to show the benefits of caching
- 101008 5y agoOh I wish I could go back. I remember that these were used a lot for Affiliates links in the sidebar, if you had a niche website. Then, they evolved to a 88x16 size, or at least that's what I remember. I used to spend a lot of hours creating those for my website... So great times, so many memories... I don't remember being happy back then, but I am sure I was, just that I didnt know.
- controlledchaos 5y agoThe internet really is for porn.
- tomcooks 5y agoSo many questions about that "Anti code and run" http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/anticodeandrun2.gif http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/anticodeandrun2.gif
- squiggleblaz 5y agoWhy? Do you like writing code that causes your computer to explode and catch fire so you have to run away from it?
- treve 5y agoWould love to compare this to a HTTP/2 version!
- slver 5y agoReminded me of this: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ ...and how many of the ads on this page are for "pixel ads" (no longer functioning of course).
- frogpelt 5y agoReminded of that too. The owner is Alex Tew who has parlayed it into a startup or two. He’s currently working on Calm.
- flixic 5y agoSeeing Netflix in Page 3 is disorienting. Reminds you that it's actually a pretty old company.
- maxpert 5y agoAhhhh the good old days! Takes me back to dream weaver and flash era.
- xwdv 5y agoWould it be better to store these as binary blobs in a database?
- neiman 5y agoThe forefather of NFTs.
- squiggleblaz 5y agoWhen I see Linux advocacy from those days it's so amusing to me in retrospect: In this case, Linux 2.0 now, with Tux dropping onto an old Windows 95 style logo. I remember GNU/Linux advocacy in that era as based around free software ideas, but when I look back at that time, there was actually a lot of ironic(?) superiority.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoIf anyone is planning on using any of those GIFs on their websites i have a request: don't. They are extremely annoying and distracting when i'm trying to read and they give me a headache. I'm not sure why any websites use GIFs. But very impressive collection nonetheless.
- nixass 5y agoFlashback to dial up era. Love it.
- jordemort 5y agoSome of these seem anachronistic; for example, there are couple for (and one against!) Discord. According to Wikipedia, Discord was released in 2015, which seems long after peak 88x31 GIF.
- justusthane 5y agoThere's a COVID-19 one too. The top of the page says "A collection of 3182 classic 88x31 buttons from the 1990’s, 2000’s, and today in GIF format. "
- ziml77 5y agoWeirdly the AdGuard Tracking Protection filter has a cosmetic rule that is blocking the images. If I'm understanding the syntax correctly it seems to be this one. ~underverse.su,~underver.se,~minu.stv.ee,~sota.com,~7kingdoms.ru,~epicl2.com,~forum.ixbt.com,~forum.themega.ru,~gamepedia.com,~makeserver.ru,~mozhor.ru,~onliner.by,~wiktionary.org,~yandex.by,~yandex.com,~yandex.com.tr,~yandex.ru,~yandex.ua##img[width="88"][height="31"] The comment says the intent is to hide hit counters.
- rvz 5y agoAnother collection waiting to be sold as an NFT soon.
- theklub 5y agoI remember putting these on my geocities page not really knowing what they were just to look cool.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYep I remember it well. That was the time the internet started doing downhill :)
- atum47 5y agoNow that I'm seeing this on my desktop it seems to be working just fine. Back this afternoon when I took a look at it from my phone, it wasn't. some of the gifs weren't loading and breaking the grid. anyways, my suggestions it would be to write a small script that iterates through a list of links and dynamically create an Image and only attaching that image to the page on the 'onLoad' function (kind of a try / catch sort of thing). Great project never the less. p.s.: do you happen to have the Russian bride link? it's for a friend
- lnyan 5y agoInteresting. I clicked into that site and found there is no GIF on the page. It turns out that all GIFs are blocked by the uBlock with cosmetic filtering. Unsurprisingly, the blocking rule is simply `img[width="88"][height="31"]`
- kemonocode 5y agoThe mix of new and old here is messing with me. Censorship pandas (A relic of early-mid 00's furry sites) and free clipart banners together with Download Discord and Mastodon buttons, ha!
- devenblake 5y agoI have some on here: www.trinity.moe/stickers Many of those are hotlinked to WayBack Machine backups of this page. 88x31s are still in use on the better parts of the web, particularly hobbyist neocities pages. I made two myself on the root of my site. There's a certain creativity necessary to work within <3000px that's mostly gone from the corporatized web today.
- chowderman 5y agoWow, this is an amazing collection of banners! For anyone have trouble with the page loading all of the gifs, I bundled all 4 of the pages into a single, massive 33 MB HTML page with all 3000+ of the GIFs encoded into data URIs. Here's the link, and all credit goes to the dabamos.de website owner for creating the collection: https://chowderman.codeberg.page/cyber_dabamos_de_88x31_gif_collection.html https://chowderman.codeberg.page/cyber_dabamos_de_88x31_gif_...
- davidpfarrell 5y ago> A collection of 3182 classic 88x31 buttons ... Seriously, we couldn't find 6 more to get to ... 3188 ?