88x31px

Why 88x31px?

88x31px (88 pixels of height by 31 pixels of width) are the dimensions of images used as buttons that link to websites in the Geocities era, specially animated images (GIFs).

For example: .

The Origin of 88x31px

It seems that reason why the size is 88x31px specifically is because Geocities used it.

Geocities hosted websites made by its users and required they linked back to Geocities. At the time, it was common for links to be images in the form of banners and buttons containing the linkee's logo, so Geocities provided a default 88x31px image for this purpose. Some users customized this button, but instead of creating one from scratch at arbitrary sizes, they just used the exact same dimensions. With this, you had many people who were fully aware of the 88x31px dimension because they had personally created buttons at that size.

We can imagine that you could easily replace on button by another without changing your website's layout because they were the same size, and this advantage would lead people to create more buttons the exactly same size so they would align nicely when placed one on top of the other, or one at the side of other.

Although we rarely see it nowadays, in the past it was common for small websites to have a "links" page filled with nothing but links to other websites. Websites provided banners and buttons so they could be linked back to, and other webmasters would take those buttons and place them on their "links" page so their visitors could find related or recommended websites. In some cases, two webmasters would agree to link to each other so they could share viewers.

Today, there is a movement to revive these concepts found in projects like Neocities.

Examples

Galleries and Collections

There are a some websites that collects 88x31px buttons, banners, and animated GIFs.

Warning: they can be a bit NSFW.

• https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ (accessed 2024-11-14)
• https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons (accessed 2024-11-14)

RSS

According to the RSS specification, if an RSS feed supplies an image but doesn't specify its dimensions, the default is 88x31px.

Maximum value for width is 144, default value is 88.

Maximum value for height is 400, default value is 31.

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification (accessed 2024-11-06)

Note: I've personally confirmed that Akregator (version 6.2.2) follows the spec.

Quotes

A recent Hackernews article linked to http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ with some animated gif banners from the 90s. Which got me to wonder: how did the ratio of 88:31 become a standard size?

[answer]

According to this article, GeoCities started it. It was really common in the '90s to just copy what the most popular sites were doing:

Why has 88:31 become the standard ratio for micro bars? [https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/140100/why-has-8831-become-the-standard-ratio-for-micro-bars] "asked Jun 16, 2021" (accessed 2024-10-27)

The cited article says:

Geocities.com proved extremely popular with thousands signing up on a weekly basis and the company attracted investment as a result (Yahoo! would eventually take over Geocities for $3.57 billion). Part of the agreement in having a free Geocities home page was to provide a link back to the main page.

[an animated GIF of a Geocities button]

The Geocities homepage link included an animated GIF file that was 88 pixels wide by 31 pixels high. Some users not happy with the default graphic produced modified versions to better fit in with the theme of their page. Graphics and buttons to link to other pages and Internet resources were also created, often at the same 88×31 size. Authors of web pages with many such graphics and buttons would arrange them into a banner, strip or grid. No doubt the popularity of Geocities (3.5 million sites had been created on it by the time of the Yahoo! purchase) helped make 88×31 size buttons and images go viral, they soon appeared on pages outside of Geocities.

[...] Soon afterwards a 88×31 graphic appeared on the 1998 W3C home page that linked to their Markup Validation Service.

Remembering Powered By and 88×31 [https://tekeye.uk/computer_history/powered-by] "Published:2012-03-27 Updated:2016-03-16" (accessed 2024-11-06)

The cited article above is written as a sequence of events: Geocities was created in 1995, and then W3C started using the size in 1998. Consequently, any use after 1998 wouldn't be the first use of the 88x31px size.

In particular, I found this claim:

It was originally Yahoo! Finance's standard for button ads on stock quote pages as 4 could fit in the space available in a row directly above the data, with 4 pixels in-between. It became widely adopted after that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/z8ha96/comment/iyd490u/ (accessed 2024-11-14)

Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, I've checked Yahoo! Finance's 90's website (http://finance.yahoo.com/), but I couldn't actually find any of said buttons, and the archive only started crawling their webpages around 1998. It's possible it was available in a different URL back then.

Gallery