[HN Gopher] We are still using 88x31 buttons
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We are still using 88x31 buttons
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-04-05 20:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ultrasciencelabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ultrasciencelabs.com)
| gerdesj wrote:
| Ahhh, now I get what Reader Mode is for.
|
| I grew up with Badgers flying overhead and later on the blink tag
| and yet this is worse!
| Lammy wrote:
| Am I missing something? I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock and
| this site still looks totally fine -- _great_ even. I love the
| colors. There are like seven example banners on the entire
| page, three icons for navigation, and mostly text.
|
| Or are you talking about some of the example sites the article
| links to like http://thombs.com/Dann_1996-06/noframes.htm in
| which case yeah I get it lol
| gerdesj wrote:
| "I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock"
|
| When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south
| and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your
| eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.
|
| I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www
| didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an
| article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some
| such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a
| typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in
| the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to
| read.
|
| Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than
| ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh
| rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really),
| is rock solid.
|
| I _can_ read the site but it is not as easy as possible for
| me and let 's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and
| fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why
| not replicate that in a web page?
|
| Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen
| widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
|
| The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black
| which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the
| glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.
|
| Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their
| design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not
| just their mates.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _When have you seen a book or mag with 1 /3 margins?_
|
| Magazines almost always have their text in thin columns,
| because long lines are difficult to follow. Books are also
| typically 1/3th the width of a typical computer screen for
| the same reason.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens
| are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.
|
| A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of
| your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you
| will note that their readers have a book shape.
|
| Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the
| most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and
| tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout,
| colours in use.
|
| How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen
| width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the
| most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and
| tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout,
| colours in use.
|
| I use HN in a half window, so the text is roughly the
| same width as the website here.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Long lines aren't that difficult to follow. And for those
| who find it so, they can just resize their browser
| window. Meanwhile I have to go mess with the dev console
| on half the sites I visit these days because they insist
| on having text in a 2-inch wide column. That is a way
| worse problem.
| msla wrote:
| Too bad Wikipedia made their site less accessible (and less
| readable) with the recent redesign.
| pxoe wrote:
| I don't know, to me the text that's spanning the entire
| width of the monitor is less accessible than a column
| with more sensible width.
| NackerHughes wrote:
| A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white
| backgrounds with black text, when the technology became
| available, to imitate the paper and documents that people
| were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for
| prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a
| light bulb.
|
| White text on a black background in print is indeed harder
| to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer
| screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
| NikkiA wrote:
| Sadly firefox's reader mode still renders it in a thin strip of
| text. Granted it's in a readable font that way, but still.
| o11c wrote:
| Title should really mention "pixels, on webpages".
| guenthert wrote:
| Indeed. I was curious about a 88x31 matrix of buttons.
| philsnow wrote:
| > "No Alteration Allowed - The Netscape Now button must not be
| altered in ANY way. Do not shrink it; take it apart; change its
| proportions, color, or font; or otherwise alter it from the
| Netscape-supplied version." did little to discourage people and
| probably outright encouraged them just for spite - y'know because
| the Internet.
|
| Colbert had Lawrence Lessig on his show and (obv in-character)
| said something along the lines of
|
| > I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out
| there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some
| great dance beat.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Can you explain this to me? I don't know what any of this
| means.
| cheschire wrote:
| Consider it related to the Streisand effect or reverse
| psychology concepts.
| philsnow wrote:
| Except that only his character was Streisand-ing it;
| Colbert-the-person thought it would be hilarious to slyly
| encourage people to remix a spoken interview with a "great
| dance beat" (and, at the time, it kind of was)
| rusk wrote:
| I think he is equating stern copyright notices to somebody
| making a strong statement about what annoys them. As if to
| say "so what", and the boom in "unapproved" 88x31 pics
| demonstrates this
| egypturnash wrote:
| so did anyone actually remix this, I wonder?
|
| yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvvhDngERXo
|
| with a followup remix of the episode where he discussed this
| remix
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=125D2DTMyGg
| bitwize wrote:
| > I would be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out
| there takes this interview right here and remixed it with some
| great dance beat.
|
| For some reason, this makes me think of Strong Bad. Probably
| because of the sbemail "sibbie", in which The Cheat does drop a
| phat beat under Strong Bad's reading of the email, much to the
| latter's consternation.
|
| https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/76-sibbie
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| Why are there zero examples of 88x31 buttons in this article?
| m463 wrote:
| lol, that's what I was thinking.
|
| That and how buttons from 30 years ago work with 4k monitors.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Here are a few samples https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
| qingcharles wrote:
| "a few"
|
| *saturates my Gigabit pipe*
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| Oh my goodness, thank you! I have been searching for a source
| of the small icons as an example to show the computing
| classes I lecture, and I finally found my rotating favorite
| one! https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/msntbciis.gif
|
| Thank you so much - on the flip side, my students may dislike
| you because they're going to get a lecture on how the web
| used to be!
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| My favorite one I think is the Internet Explorer/Google
| Chrome "Same shit different - " one, because it's obviously
| recent and somehow iconic of the sort of person who
| reminisces about the old web, and clearly narrowcasting to
| such people.
| zenethian wrote:
| Ha, opened the comments to say exactly this. Truly infuriating.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I would guess that the author simply tacitly assumed that any
| reader would have the general look of 88x31 buttons etched in
| their visual memory.
| thih9 wrote:
| The first paragraph of the article links to the buttons.
|
| > Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements
| spanning over 25 years:
|
| > (...)
|
| > They all feature 88x31 buttons in some capacity and those
| buttons reflect the website and it's designer in some way.
| bcraven wrote:
| I disagree, they all feature _multiple_ elements and it's
| only obvious what the 88x31 button is if you already know.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This vagueness and assumed context seems so common
| nowadays... you're supposed to be in the know already and
| it's gauche to ask...
| IncRnd wrote:
| At first I read this as a typo for the 88c31 micro-controller
| that is used in buttons.
|
| My stock answer was, "Good point, the 88c31 seems overkill for
| a button. But... AI isn't great for detecting button pushes."
|
| Then, I realized the page was just a rant about web buttons and
| didn't actually show example web buttons.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Did you not read "Some examples of sites sharing some thematic
| elements spanning over 25 years:" followed by links to
| different galleries? Is clicking a link all that hard? It lets
| the reader browse examples at their own pace. I thought this
| was HN, not TikTok.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes but what is it - they are just elements - no description
| of what they are.
| kelnos wrote:
| Love how the top comment right now is from someone who didn't
| read the second paragraph in the article, where it links to a
| bunch of sites with 88x31 buttons.
| kadoban wrote:
| I clicked through a couple of those pages, didn't see any
| obvious buttons and even if I did, kind of ambiguous which
| ones are the right size without checking.
|
| Article really could have used an example or two.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| I actually did click through the links to find those, and I
| was annoyed that I had to do that instead of having at least
| one rendered inline in the article.
|
| It even has some examples of other size images inline, but
| none of the titular 88x31 buttons. I found it odd.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| Or even an explanation of what the term means
| mubou wrote:
| Yeah, I knew what they were but I'd never heard them
| described as "88x31 buttons," even back in the early 00s, so
| I had no idea what this article was going on about at first.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| The first sentence contains a footnote (1) with links to a
| bunch of examples.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| the worst kind of correct
| a3w wrote:
| 88 x 31 _pixels_? I had a hard time grasping, what the author
| is talking about. Especially since he shows large banners, not
| smaller buttons.
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect the size hung around for a while for a couple of
| reasons.
|
| The physical size (on screen) didn't vary by much. If I recall
| correctly, 72 to 120 dpi dominated until the introduction of
| Retina/HiDPI displays, and 120 dpi was pushing the limit since
| scaling wasn't really a thing. (When it was a thing, it tended to
| be handled by applications where it was important, such as
| desktop publishing/graphics design applications, and it only
| extended to the content area.)
|
| Add that to the purpose of these buttons: they were intended to
| be unobtrusive messages about which browsers were supported, or
| which browser the site owner prefered. Going bigger would not
| have much of a point. (That said, they were as obtrusive as heck
| to those of us using unsupported browsers!)
| DecentShoes wrote:
| Kinda seems like an article like this should have some pictures
| of this button?
| fnord77 wrote:
| it's not even a golden rectangle :)
| tommica wrote:
| Clicking the links and seeing some of those old sites really
| gives ahit of nostalgia.
|
| Really good info in the article, enjoyed the read - but as others
| mentioned, some pictures would have been nice
| varun_ch wrote:
| I love the 88x31 buttons to friends sites the most. From this
| blog post, I was able to follow ~10 links and end up on my own
| homepage. I think that's beautiful.
| capitain wrote:
| I called it pieces of flair:
| https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2024-04-26-how-...
| dplgk wrote:
| Related: some ex-Geocities employee somewhere must have a back up
| of all those sites?
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Not as far as anyone is aware. There were massive archiving
| efforts running leading up to the shutdown. One archive
| reproduced the directory tree and most GeoCities links could be
| replaced with reocities and simply worked.
|
| I think the main bulk of the archives for slurped into the
| internet archive. I don't know if any of the independent
| GeoCities archives are still online, but everything that was
| saved should be in the IA by now.
| anthk wrote:
| https://theoldnet.com, scroll down.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The change from Netscape saying the official dimensions are 88x32
| to everyone using 88x31 seems worthy of more investigation. The
| idea that Netscape made the unofficial one 31 instead of 32 as a
| way to tell who was official or not doesn't seem very likely to
| me.
| Multicomp wrote:
| The Agora road forum (a bunch of syntheave plus retired 4channers
| plus paranormal conspiracists and their dark web adjacent
| denizens with some retrofuturist early web revival themes) uses
| these buttons and calls them gangtags though the sizes are not
| always 88x31. It's nice to see the creativity of the new ones
| each months.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I made 88x31 buttons for my homepage[1] a few weeks ago. Phone
| users will have to rotate to landscape to see them.
|
| [1]: https://webb.page/
| rolfus wrote:
| This brings me back to my N64 Perfect Dark fansite webmaster-
| days. I wonder if there's a similar article detailing another
| cultural internet phenomenon; the tech-forum signatures.
|
| For example; I remember the heyday of the MadOnion forums (the
| makers of 3D Mark, before they changed their name to Futuremark)
| and their users having these massive information-dense signature
| banners showcasing their PC-specs, 3D-mark scores, OC-info, etc.)
| with and without animations. Even at the time I remember thinking
| some of them were over the top and distracting, but people really
| put their hearts into making those things and it took some skill
| to make a really good one.
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