I've missed Web buttons. I remember entire movements done using them back in the mid 90's. There were some boycotts where people would put the buttons on their site to show support.
I also remember the ones proudly showing that their web page was written in Notepad or even Edit instead of some bloat ridden Frontpage or other generator site.
https://9ol.es/buttons/index.html a while back I did some archival scraping for these (using things like last modified dates, looking for meta generator tags... I forget how I wrote it exactly, it's probably somewhere)
I did some research in icon packs but as far as I can find, a bunch of these are just independent creations.
Therefore, I believe this collection is the definitive source of all of them. I found no other modern effort at collecting them.
Those are just.. buttons. But they are not 'web buttons' like you'd see everywhere on the web in the 90s. They are the same shape and size as the link above, and they were indeed often animated GIFs.
They're earlier. There's basically 3 design eras. The first used 1 bit transparent gifs (i used those on my bootstra386.com site)
The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...
Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.
You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.
The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997
When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.
You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as
88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one
The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.
The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.
I was around back then. There were many button sizes, and I did not say those weren't real, existing buttons: they were common navigational aids on homepages. But they are not _web buttons_ as anybody would interpret them today. They are just buttons. The GP and the link talk specifically about _web buttons_.
I was around then as well but I'm not going to rely on the fickleness of 30 year old memories to be more authoritative than contemporaneous manuscripts.
The fact that you see buttons made exclusively for the web and existing exclusively on the Web and covering early web culture as not "web buttons" is an interesting distinction.
I mean you do you. Language is what we make it. I just wonder where such a perception comes from
huh? 1 bit transparent gifs of the 80s? I didn't make that claim. There's two gif standards, GIF87a and GIF89a they were by compuserve. 89a introduced transparency. Netscape Navigator 2.0 introduced support for animated looping GIFs in 1995, this was the game changer.
GIF wasn't a widely used raster format of the 1980s. That would be PCX, MSP (pre BMP), PIC (Macintosh PICT), IMG (GEM), TIFF, Dr. Halo (CUT/PAL), TARGA...
None of the 1980s image formats are in use anymore except for Postscript which is a programming language so it doesn't really count. The TIFF of the 1980s (the kind that NextStep generates for instance) won't even open in modern imagemagick with libtiff stripping that support 15 years ago (along with a lot of other companies ebullient artistic license of the TIFF standard). Modern TIFF uses standards dated post 2000.
If you need to open a TIF dated from the 1980s, hit me up, I've had to resurrect these parsers before.
Oops my bad. I assumed they were from late 80s since I was under the impression the 88x31s were popularized by a Netscape button from ~93. (But I could be completely mistaken about that; I’m by no means an expert.)
I miss those 350x19 "userbar" images that people used to stack in their forum signatures. Can we get those on HN? I need everyone to know I use Dreamweaver.
The capture process sounds much more complicated than necessary. There are emulators that can capture the output as APNG/GIF/... If you really want to make sure that you have every frame, a good emulator also supports manual frame stepping without having to use the debugger.
Yeah I definitely could have improved the capture method. It happens to be that I'm already familiar enough with GBZ80 assembly, but given how tedious taking the actual screenshots was I would opt for a less complicated solution in the future.
As a side effect of owning a GBC since I was 12, I can hear this gif!
Over 20 years later, the atomic purple now looks a bit yellowish, and I had to replace the polarizer at some point due to UV damage, otherwise still working perfectly fine.
I really like the colorful animation on the button. I was actually close to using the same technique for the DeepWalker intro, just open it on desktop in a browser that supports 3D.
I've missed Web buttons. I remember entire movements done using them back in the mid 90's. There were some boycotts where people would put the buttons on their site to show support.
I also remember the ones proudly showing that their web page was written in Notepad or even Edit instead of some bloat ridden Frontpage or other generator site.
This was a really fun read. Will sub to your rss!
https://9ol.es/buttons/index.html a while back I did some archival scraping for these (using things like last modified dates, looking for meta generator tags... I forget how I wrote it exactly, it's probably somewhere)
I did some research in icon packs but as far as I can find, a bunch of these are just independent creations.
Therefore, I believe this collection is the definitive source of all of them. I found no other modern effort at collecting them.
Those are just.. buttons. But they are not 'web buttons' like you'd see everywhere on the web in the 90s. They are the same shape and size as the link above, and they were indeed often animated GIFs.
They're earlier. There's basically 3 design eras. The first used 1 bit transparent gifs (i used those on my bootstra386.com site)
The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...
Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.
You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.
The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997
When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.
You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as
https://youtu.be/-1l6aBgX5UY?si=UioQTDenqHelQc07
88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one
The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.
The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.
I was around back then. There were many button sizes, and I did not say those weren't real, existing buttons: they were common navigational aids on homepages. But they are not _web buttons_ as anybody would interpret them today. They are just buttons. The GP and the link talk specifically about _web buttons_.
I was around then as well but I'm not going to rely on the fickleness of 30 year old memories to be more authoritative than contemporaneous manuscripts.
The fact that you see buttons made exclusively for the web and existing exclusively on the Web and covering early web culture as not "web buttons" is an interesting distinction.
I mean you do you. Language is what we make it. I just wonder where such a perception comes from
Really interesting history, I didn't know about the 1-bit transparent gifs of the 80s!
huh? 1 bit transparent gifs of the 80s? I didn't make that claim. There's two gif standards, GIF87a and GIF89a they were by compuserve. 89a introduced transparency. Netscape Navigator 2.0 introduced support for animated looping GIFs in 1995, this was the game changer.
GIF wasn't a widely used raster format of the 1980s. That would be PCX, MSP (pre BMP), PIC (Macintosh PICT), IMG (GEM), TIFF, Dr. Halo (CUT/PAL), TARGA...
None of the 1980s image formats are in use anymore except for Postscript which is a programming language so it doesn't really count. The TIFF of the 1980s (the kind that NextStep generates for instance) won't even open in modern imagemagick with libtiff stripping that support 15 years ago (along with a lot of other companies ebullient artistic license of the TIFF standard). Modern TIFF uses standards dated post 2000.
If you need to open a TIF dated from the 1980s, hit me up, I've had to resurrect these parsers before.
Oops my bad. I assumed they were from late 80s since I was under the impression the 88x31s were popularized by a Netscape button from ~93. (But I could be completely mistaken about that; I’m by no means an expert.)
Regardless, this is really interesting!
Here are a few https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons
(HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793273 )
I miss those 350x19 "userbar" images that people used to stack in their forum signatures. Can we get those on HN? I need everyone to know I use Dreamweaver.
http://tiptopglobe.com/free-forum-userbars
My favourite thing about these is that nearly everyone just kind of agreed on using that same pixel font for the text on the right side.
I miss forums being more prevalent. I guess Facebook and other social media killed the prevalence of forums.
Thanks so much! Hopefully I'll post more on my blog this year
I love the comeback of web buttons. And pages like this that go into great detail of such a niche thing.
Thanks for the kind words! :)
Cool post!
The capture process sounds much more complicated than necessary. There are emulators that can capture the output as APNG/GIF/... If you really want to make sure that you have every frame, a good emulator also supports manual frame stepping without having to use the debugger.
Thank you!
Yeah I definitely could have improved the capture method. It happens to be that I'm already familiar enough with GBZ80 assembly, but given how tedious taking the actual screenshots was I would opt for a less complicated solution in the future.
You could also use a screen recorder with a non-lossy codec and grab the frames from that
As a side effect of owning a GBC since I was 12, I can hear this gif!
Over 20 years later, the atomic purple now looks a bit yellowish, and I had to replace the polarizer at some point due to UV damage, otherwise still working perfectly fine.
Great work!
Also, Nintendo lawsuit incoming in 3...2...
Thanks!
> Also, Nintendo lawsuit incoming in 3...2...
Lol I sure hope not
There is a big collection here: https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
Very nicely done! Great blog as well, I’ve subbed to your RSS.
Thank you! I don't post as often as I'd like to, but I'm hoping to blog more this year
Excellent writeup. Thank yiu for showing the details step by step.
Thanks! I'm glad people appreciated seeing my process for this silly little project
[dead]
I really like the colorful animation on the button. I was actually close to using the same technique for the DeepWalker intro, just open it on desktop in a browser that supports 3D.
[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz
I feel like you're self-promoting a little bit too much.