The 88x31 button

1. The wall

Some examples, 200 of them, from three public archives. Every one of these pointed at somebody's website.

2. What you are looking at

A button is a link with a face. Eighty-eight pixels wide, thirty-one tall, usually under three kilobytes. It sat at the bottom of a page and pointed at another one. That is the entire object, and almost everything interesting about it is in who made it and why.

It started as browser advocacy

Netscape ran a badge programme, archived from May 1996, which gave you a graphic and told you exactly what to write underneath it:

This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0. Download Netscape Now!

The point was not decoration. The web in 1996 rendered differently in different browsers, badly, and a badge was how you told a visitor which one you had built for. Half the buttons above are still doing that job: best viewed with, powered by, made with.

Then the free hosts made it universal

GeoCities gave away web space, and the price was a link. From their member terms, last modified 22 November 1996:

The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities.

A link is all they asked for. What they handed you in the sample code was an image, and that image, pulled from the archive and measured, is 88 by 31. Millions of pages carried one because the landlord required it, which is how a size becomes a habit.

The ad industry wrote the number down

On 10 December 1996 the Internet Advertising Bureau and CASIE announced the first voluntary standards for banner advertising: eight sizes, of which the smallest is 88 x 31, the Micro Button. Read what the committee says it did, though:

the Standards and Practices Committee of the IAB with input from CASIE has used market data to examine the full range of banner types [...] and sizes currently in use.

They catalogued the size. They did not set it. It was already out there, which means the badge came first and the ad unit was named after it rather than the other way round.

And then people took it off all three of them

Chaz Boston Baden ran one of the earliest pages of homemade buttons. His explanation, revised April 1997, is still the best one anybody has written:

It's all Netscape's fault.

Netscape [...] started it all, with their "Netscape Now!" buttons. Other people started making their own buttons, using the same style but substituting their own graphics and text. (Many of them kept the "Now!" lettering, as that's part of the joke.)

So the shape got borrowed from an ad, and the ad shape got filled with a person. That is the turn this whole plate is about.

What it turned into was a currency

Once anyone could make one, the button stopped being a credential and became an exchange. You put someone's button on your page, they put yours on theirs, and the standing rule was that you hosted the file yourself instead of pointing at theirs.

I would ask that you upload my banner to your own site, and I will return the favor for you.

Sailor Io, GeoCities Tokyo/2666, snapshot 1999-02-03

You may be wondering why I made all these wonderful buttons. Well, I was bored and I had a lot of fun making them.

cammieao, GeoCities Hollywood/4198, snapshot 1999-10-01

Chaz's companion page is titled "Hazel's Friends and Acquaintances." Its entire body is twelve of these, every one hard-coded to 88 by 31, and every alt attribute is just a person's first name. An ad-shaped unit used as a list of friends, with the title saying so out loud.

3. The size was never in the file

Everything above assumes these are all 88 by 31. Nineteen of the 200 are not, and you cannot tell by looking, because the size was never enforced by the image. It was enforced by two attributes that people typed by hand and asked each other to remember.

And the convention is exact, in both directions. Sixteen of sixteen period button images carry both width and height. Across the 707 buttons on one modern collection page, 59 on another and 39 on a third, exactly one does. Where a modern page does specify them it writes width="88px", which is not valid in an HTML presentational attribute. Browsers accept it anyway. The convention is now being copied from CSS habits, by people who never had to type WIDTH=88.

<IMG SRC="netscape.gif" ALT="Netscape 3.0+" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=31 WIDTH=88>
<IMG SRC="iexplore.gif" ALT="IE 3.0+" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=31 WIDTH=88>
<IMG SRC="geocities.gif" ALT="Geocities" HSPACE=10 BORDER=0 HEIGHT=31 WIDTH=88 ALIGN=ABSCENTER>

<textarea rows><a href="https://owlman.neocities.org"><img src="https://owlman.neocities.org/OwlMan/Banners/owlmanbanner8831.gif"></a></textarea>

4. The one pixel that got copied wrong

So the size was a request. Here is the strange part: nobody was ever requesting the number Netscape wrote down. Netscape published a written specification for their button, and it does not agree with the file they shipped.

netscape_now.gif, measured from the file header: 88 x 31, GIF, 32 colours, single frame, 1146 bytes.

Show me the 31st row

Netscape Now Usage Guidelines, archived 1996-10-26

Minimum Size. The minimum size of the Netscape Now button is 88 by 32 pixels. The button may be displayed at a larger size, but all elements of the button must be increased in size proportionally.

Every <img> on Netscape's own pages said HEIGHT=31. The file is 31. The spec sheet said 32. The number the whole web went on to copy for the next thirty years was the one in the file and the attribute, and it was never the one Netscape wrote down.

5. There was no button wall in 1999

Roughly 950 archived URLs were pulled across sixteen GeoCities neighbourhoods plus Angelfire and Tripod, filtered toward filenames like links, linktome, banners and affiliates. Not one page in that sample carries an undifferentiated wall of 88x31 buttons. The wall is a revival-era form. Here is every page that was counted, image by image.

What a 1999 page actually had was a badge cluster of two to four: the browser, the free host, the guestbook provider, the webring. The record in the whole sample is four. Each one was a claim about how the page should be viewed, not a portrait of who made it. The banner walls that did exist were not 88x31 at all: 400x60, 500x130, 162x116, all in one column.