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 link with a face. Eighty-eight by thirty-one, usually under three kilobytes. Everything interesting about it is who made it, and why.

It started as browser advocacy

Netscape ran a badge program, 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!

Pages rendered differently in different browsers, badly. A badge told you which one the author built for.

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.

They asked for a link and handed you an image, measured from the archive at 88 by 31. Millions carried one because the landlord required it. That is how a size becomes a habit.

The ad industry wrote the number down

They cataloged the size. They did not set it. The badge came first and the ad unit was named after it.

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.)

The shape got borrowed from an ad, then filled with a person. That is the turn.

What it turned into was a currency

Once anyone could make one it stopped being a credential and became an exchange, with a standing rule: host the file yourself.

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

Chaz's companion page is titled "Hazel's Friends and Acquaintances." Twelve of these, every alt just a first name. An ad unit used as a list of friends.

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.

Sixteen of sixteen period buttons carry both width and height. Across 707, 59 and 39 buttons on three modern collections, exactly one does, and it writes width="88px", which is not valid in a presentational attribute. 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, and nobody was requesting the number Netscape wrote down. Their published specification does not agree with the file they shipped.

netscape_now.gif, measured from the file header: 88 x 31, GIF, 128 colors, single frame, 1,948 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.

Netscape's own pages said HEIGHT=31. The file is 31. The spec sheet said 32. The web copied the file, never the sheet.

5. There was no button wall in 1999

Roughly 950 archived URLs across sixteen GeoCities neighborhoods, Angelfire and Tripod. Not one carries a wall of 88x31 buttons. The wall is a revival-era form. Every page counted:

What a 1999 page had was a cluster of two to four: browser, host, guestbook, webring. The record in the sample is four. Each was a claim about how to view the page, not a portrait of its author.