We are still using 88x31 buttons

Summary

introduction If you surf the modern "small web" to any extent you've encountered 88x31 buttons - a staple of late 90s and early 2000's websites undergoing a bit of a revival. The Neocities community especially seems to have truly embraced them. 88x31 buttons have a long history on the web, straddling the worlds of advertising and the personal web. Much like IRL jacket pins and buttons - they're small, colorful, collectible, easy to make and trade, and at a glance can confer just enough information to characterize the website displaying them. Some examples of sites sharing some thematic elements spanning over 25 years: Dann's Page Bill's World Paintkiller's links page Solaria's Webspace Ellie's Magical Website ByteMoth's Perfectly Cooked Pages They all feature 88x31 buttons in some capacity and those buttons reflect the website and it's designer in some way. Despite their persistence into the 2020's (or maybe because of it), there seems to be some debate on the origin of the 88x31 format - some point to early Geocities websites, others Netscape's infamously ubiquitous "Now" buttons. Neonaut's 88x31 page compares the 1996 Geocities.com and Netscape.com snapshots on the Wayback Machine to draw that conclusion. However, the snapshot shows a button advertising the new 3.0 release. But the "now" button goes back earlier. when did the 88x31 emerge? The Version Museum list of Netscape screenshots has an image of Navigator version 1.2 (probably 1.22) dated from 1995 showing the Netscape homepage and the earliest instance of the 'Netscape Now' button which had no version number (Netscape 1.22 was released in 1995). Screenshots of the Netscape site from 1994 do not show any 88x31 buttons. The earliest version of the GeoCities homepage I can find is on Web Design Museum and dates from 1995. It doesn't show any 88x31 buttons, but it does have a full banner, and two buttons that appear to be more like 88x40. The October 22 1996 snapshot of the re-designed homepage shows several 8...