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>> 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
by 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.