The 88x31 GIF Collection
99 points by vladde 4 months ago | 35 comments- avian 4 months agoI was wondering where the odd 88x31 size came from. According to this [1] it's basically because at one point GeoCities used a GIF of this size and then everyone copied it.
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/140100/why-has-8831-b...
- rchaud 4 months agoKeeping them at a uniform size probably helped them stack evenly when displayed in an HTML table. Back in the day, these GIFs served as site badges or favicons, which weren't created until 1999.
- jagermo 4 months agointeresting, so basically a standard by simply everyone using it, like the #. Cool.
- rchaud 4 months ago
- Philpax 4 months agoIf you enjoy this, you may also enjoy https://eightyeightthirty.one/, which is a network graph of every website with 88x31 links, updated weekly.
- BugsJustFindMe 4 months agoPage crashes repeatedly for me in iOS Safari
- lotrjohn 4 months agoUsername checks out…
- lotrjohn 4 months ago
- BugsJustFindMe 4 months ago
- acheron 4 months agoWhat were the ones that were narrower that usually said things like “Apache” or “XHTML” or something technical?
Ah here, 80x15 badges: https://web.badges.world
I think those were popular a bit later than the 88x31 ones.
- myfonj 4 months agoFor crisp and quadrupled device pixels there, F12 console and:
with( document.documentElement.style ){ transformOrigin = '0 0'; imageRendering = 'pixelated'; scale = 1 / devicePixelRatio * 4; } - card_zero 4 months agoSeeing all these load immediately, and none of them stall, and then they all animate simultaneously and the browser doesn't crash ... feels really weird.
- jFriedensreich 4 months agoThe joke is on me because i still see them load in slowly about 10 at a time.
- Cthulhu_ 4 months agoIt's still HTTP 1.1, it's got 5 or so requests at a time but many short iterative download bursts. Since the server seems to use nginx and already uses https, upgrading to HTTP 2 or 3 shouldn't be a big issue.
- Cthulhu_ 4 months ago
- ramon156 4 months agoFunny, on the in-app browser of Harmonic it still goes on-by-one. Firefox on mobile also instantly loads.
More nostalgia I suppose!
- jFriedensreich 4 months ago
- jihadjihad 4 months agoSeeing all the Macromedia ones (“Made with Macromedia Dreamweaver”) right next to the Adobe ones is probably intentional, but still a little jarring even all these years later.
I cut my teeth building sites with Dreamweaver back in the day and still am sore about Adobe letting it wither on the vine after the acquisition.
- patates 4 months agoThere are some which may be NSFW. Just FYI.
I'll wait until I switch to my private computer to dive into it more :)
- jFriedensreich 4 months agoOne phrase caught my attention saying "No frames now!" in a few variations. Were frames a disputed feature at one time?
- forgotmypw17 4 months agoAs another comment mentioned, frames were originally a proprietary Netscape feature and required special attention to make accessible to any other browser (using the noframes tag and providing links to the framed content, for example). Otherwise, users would just see an empty page (or, worse, a “best viewed with Netscape” message.)
Before IE, there were at least two smaller browser “skirmishes”, and this was one of them. One before it was with Mosaic and inline image support, which most browsers did not have at the time (only links to view/download.)
- rendx 4 months agoAren't they still, or rather, almost completely dead and gone?
- teddyh 4 months agoIIRC, frames was originally a proprietary Netscape-only feature, at a time when the Netscape browser was proprietary, commercial, and did not support many platforms, and many people therefore used other browsers and/or other platforms which did not support frames.
- theshrike79 4 months agoFrames were used because server side rendering of partial pages was sometimes a massive pain. There was no fancy React DOM that could refresh just the relevant bits.
In these cases you just added a frame and you could click through content and the navigation would stay in place.
...but then, like always, people went overboard and pages started to have 42 frames within frames within frames and it made everything painful.
- 2mlWQbCK 4 months agoEven when reasonably sensibly used the result was a page where you could not bookmark sub-pages (important at the time, when everyone was still using bookmarks!).
This forum thread from 25 years ago that came up near the top when I searched for frame hate was a fun window into a different time with many expressing just why and how much they hated frames:
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-htm...
Happily surprised to see that the page linked towards the end of the thread, last modified in 1997, is still online: https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html
- 2mlWQbCK 4 months ago
- forgotmypw17 4 months ago
- jwilk 4 months agoPreviously:
2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465455 (45 comments)
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624 (124 comments)
- matsemann 4 months agoIn the same vein, under construction geocities archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879255 / http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
- matsemann 4 months ago
- talles 4 months agoI've picked my favorite: https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/nowebp.gif
- drbig 4 months agoThe visual cacophony! The silent scream!
A truly marvelous collection.
- Tepix 4 months agoNeat. However, with today's 4K screens, 88x31 is really tiny...
- dialup_sounds 4 months agoYou may also enjoy 80x15 badges: https://web.badges.world/
- p0w3n3d 4 months agoLooks like www.milliondollarhomepage.com
- yapyap 4 months agoah man, them loading in was satisfying!
- 4 months ago
