Sources: The 88x31 button I · Decoration
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Source. The {wall.length} buttons are rehosted from cyber.dabamos.de, neonaut and 88x31.nl, fetched once each and served from this origin, never hotlinked, following the only stated etiquette in the field: "Feel free to copy buttons to your website, but avoid hot-linking if possible." Every one is a third-party work of unknown rights; none of the three archives licenses the individual buttons, because none of them owns the individual buttons. Every dimension, frame count and color count on this page was parsed from the file's own bytes, not from a filename or an attribute.
The historical claims. Netscape's guidelines, application page and qualifications page are Wayback captures of netscape.com from 1996; the button was measured from two separate captures of the shipped file. The page counts in section 3 were made by scanning the captured bytes of each page. Chaz Boston Baden's pages are GeoCities NapaValley/2022, revised April 1997. Claims this research could not source are deliberately absent, including any launch date for the Netscape Now program, any date for when button walls declined, and every published explanation of why the number is 88 by 31. Netscape never explained it, and 31 is not a multiple of 8.
The maker is a recreation, not an emulation. It composes in palette-index space and writes GIF89a with an uncompressed-LZW encoder written for this page, so the output is a real GIF that any decoder will read, but it is not the output of any period tool. Type is a FontStruct recreation of MS Sans Serif by "lou" (CC BY-SA 3.0), with VT323 by Peter Hull and Silkscreen by Jason Kottke (both OFL 1.1). Verdana, which is the face actually measured inside real buttons, cannot be redistributed and is not shipped. The page's own colors are taken verbatim from two captured pages: bgcolor="#C0C0C0" with maroon links from SiliconValley/9014, and the black band from Vienna/9326.