88x31

March 5, 2024 7:01 AM

Millenials and other oldsters might remember the "Netscape Now!" buttons of internet yore. Today, these buttons are nothing more than a low resolution memory, but the operator of hellnet has done the work to bring them back. They did so by scanning the internet archive's Geocities archive for 88x31 pixel resolution images. Now, thanks to their work, you too can experience the surprisingly rich creative possibilities afforded by such a humble canvas.
posted by signsofrain (26 comments total)

Wait, where are the Netscape Now! buttons? There doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to search for particular buttons in that big pile. Am I missing something? This looks like a completely unstructured tiny-gif data dump suitable for computers to make sense of, not humans.
posted by MiraK at 7:08 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Found another site with the actual Netscape Now! buttons, yay.
posted by MiraK at 7:11 AM on March 5 [5 favorites]

I lived through that Internet era -- I believe my Geocities site was in Heartland -- but didn't really remember Netscape Now! buttons in particular. I went looking for more background on what a Netscape Now! button is, etc, and didn't find a lot of background detail, but did find plenty of other archives.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:15 AM on March 5 [2 favorites]

Go right two, go down ten.
posted by credulous at 7:26 AM on March 5

> Go right two, go down ten.
- credulous

... eponysterical? Following your instructions on the linked page in OP leads me to this back button. You got me.
posted by MiraK at 7:30 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

I proudly had a "Made With Notepad" 88x31 button on my website for a long time. All of my various websites had a 88x31 button for the fans to put on their own blogs. I even wrote a little Perl script that output a javascript widget that would loop through them, with a place where people could upload their own with a link to get put into rotation, so others could embed the random button feature in their own sites. The internet was a different place back then.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:33 AM on March 5 [9 favorites]

I realize I might have worded this post slightly ambiguously. I didn't mean to imply the archive was of "Netscape Now" buttons or even that it contained any. My thought process was "how do I describe this kind of button so that folks will have some idea what I'm talking about. For me, the Netscape Now button is the kind of "ur-example" of this kind of button.

Anyway, I'm digging all these other links being posted. Retro internet appreciators unite! May your links be royal blue, and your backgrounds gunmetal grey until the trumpets of winsock no longer sound.
posted by signsofrain at 7:40 AM on March 5 [7 favorites]

/looks for copy of Creating Killer Websites
posted by MonsieurPEB at 7:57 AM on March 5 [6 favorites]

I don't have time to scan through all of them, but I hope the censorship pandas are in there somewhere.

Everyone who doesn't immediately know what I'm talking about: The internet was a very different place in the early 2000s.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:01 AM on March 5 [2 favorites]

This seems like the right place to report that Webrings still exist. There are more than you'd expect, too.
posted by tommasz at 8:02 AM on March 5 [10 favorites]

I also lived through this era but don’t have a great memory of what these buttons were, or what they were for. Were they like a button you would wear on your lapel pin but for the website?
posted by Jon_Evil at 9:09 AM on March 5 [2 favorites]

I've never understood why "standard" web elements were such odd sizes. 88x31 isn't the size of anything
posted by scruss at 9:13 AM on March 5 [5 favorites]

Sure it is, it's the size of these buttons
posted by potrzebie at 9:30 AM on March 5 [13 favorites]

What were the buttons that replaced these called? The small, rectangular ones with the thin font, thin boarder and the half-filled in background color?

When those first came out, they were so classy compared to the 88x31 icons.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:44 AM on March 5

These were like NFTs. They were adjacent to clout, and you could copy them, but they didn't cost anything.
posted by otherchaz at 10:14 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Wait, where are the Netscape Now! buttons?

My first random click on the page numbers was page 42, and there some are at the top.

Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket...
posted by msbrauer at 10:18 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

@msbrauer 😮 you definitely should
posted by MiraK at 11:02 AM on March 5

RonButNotStupid, I think you're thinking of these web badges (I didn't know they were called that either).

Thanks, signsofrain, for this nostalgia blast! I recognize one or two on the front page. I love the creativity that went into some of these.
posted by invokeuse at 12:13 PM on March 5 [6 favorites]

invokeuse I was just gonna post that! I've always been partial to the simpler and more austere 80x15 badges myself.
posted by technodelic at 12:17 PM on March 5 [3 favorites]

I've never understood why "standard" web elements were such odd sizes.

Yeah, for example each of the 88×31 “Netscape Now” buttons has a 2px bezel around an 84×27px button face, which itself has 2px of padding around a 24×23px Netscape icon. They squashed a standard 24px square icon into a slightly off-square shape just to center it within the odd-sized button format.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:01 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

Hey, I'm an oldster. I can remember reading on USENET that some guy had cobbled together what he called The World Wide Web meant to be navigated with a hypertext "browser"...
posted by jim in austin at 6:31 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

Just scrolling. These are beautiful.
posted by Zumbador at 7:46 PM on March 5

Is there any reason these were 88x31 in particular? Who or what enforced that odd ratio?
posted by skiles at 2:10 PM on March 6 [2 favorites]

RonButNotStupid and invokeuse, those thinner ones were called "antipixel buttons."
posted by everdred at 3:14 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]

For those wondering "why 88x31" I found a pretty good answer on quora. Inasmuch as questions about the early history of the web can be answered when much of those early bits have rotted, this is a pretty good, well researched answer. Basically, "cuz Geocities did it first"
posted by signsofrain at 6:30 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

That array of rectangles reminded me of The Million Dollar Homepage.
posted by neuron at 8:36 AM on March 8