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The Origin of the <blink> Tag
- bkrausz 16y agoMinor bug report: The url has > & < stripped rather than escaped, so I needed to resubmit with the > & < replaced with > and <
- Groxx 16y agoHuh. I'd always imagined more circumscribed pentagrams were involved. And some chanting. And a cubicle. <Blink> on, Lynx lovers. It does make sense in that context, especially after my recent 4-month battle with Ncurses. edit: wow, this guy is influential. And no wonder he was considering Lynx in this: http://www.montulli.org/lou http://www.montulli.org/lou
- prodigal_erik 16y agoThanks, I actually have more respect for them knowing this was a practical joke and not a seriously advocated feature.
- gaius 16y agoI always assumed IBM or someone requested it as part of the bundled 3270 emulator.
- Luyt 16y agoI can also remember the <marquee> tag, equally annoying. It's impossible to concentrate on the content of a page when something is moving in the corner of your eye. Luckily, back then I used Opera, which had the ability to make the marquee texts stop scrolling.
- klaaspieter 16y agoYeah I'm really curious about the story behind the <marquee> tag now.
- chc 16y agoThat was really the most annoying tag. Blinking text was schlocky but usually minor in the context of the page. Marquees were long and annoying by design.
- arethuza 16y agoI know of commercial software that uses a marquee - god knows how it is implemented but is really annoying. It's a service desk system - presumably it is there to deter people from submitting requests.
- jgrahamc 16y agoThe web page for our internal build monitor (which summarizes Hudson status) uses the blink tag to flash the word Building when a build is in progress and the marquee tag to scroll the names of the people who broke the build. In most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoIn most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful. ...at least in the case of <marquee>, precisely because it's annoying.
- jyothi 16y agoInteresting story there. Lou Montulli says he is the inventor because he mentioned something on those lines over coffee. Sadly he doesn't even state the engineer's name who actually took his joke to implementation to get <blink> into the browser.
- martinp 16y agoThe engineer who implemented it has been in hiding since the late 90s.
- joeyh 16y agoSomehow I got it in my head that jwz implemented it. And I'm not the only one. But I can't find actual proof of the evil deed, and jwz in fact denies it -- although he does take credit for adding "MilSpec blinking". It seems that at worst jwz was responsible for eventually adding it to the linux version of Mozilla. While the original implementor fessed up last year, and actually got into mozilla's credits for it at long last: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_for_blink.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_... Urk, now I'm remembering one time when I walked by jwz somewhere in SoMa, and thought "if he wasn't on the other side of the street already, I'd have to cross to avoid that evil blink tag creator". And now I'm feeling all regretful. Will the pain that tag inflicted on the world never cease? (BTW, Microsoft are responsible for marquee.)
- tung 16y agoThis page has blink tags, but oddly/sensibly they don't seem to work on my version of Chromium: http://www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html http://www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html
- _delirium 16y agoSeems to be on purpose on the Chrome/Chromium team's part. Fortunately, there's a userscript workaround! http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/74241 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/74241
- cromulent 16y agoPreviously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439403 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439403
- bkrausz 16y agoWeird that it didn't get filtered out by the HN de-duping. Something to do with the > & <?
- ptomato 16y agoHN's de-duping will only reject articles that are still in memory, which is generally articles that have been viewed fairly recently.
- mavroprovato 16y agoGood thing it got resubmitted, because those 2 have 2 votes each
- joshfinnie 16y agoAmazing what a realitively slow news day will do for some resubmitted news articles.
- dagw 16y agoMy favorite bit: "The evening progressed pretty normally from there...with me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife." He seems to be have far more interesting normal nights out than me.
- eru 16y agoHe seems to have a much smaller number of normal nights out, when meeting his future wife is normal. (Since it can't happen very often almost by definition.)
- access_denied 16y agoThe first 'blink' I used was a MS-BASIC command on a Zilog-80 machine. Later I always loved Netscape for remembering me of those times.
- jakevoytko 16y agoI'm glad that Lynx never got <blink>. I use it on a day-to-day basis! Why? Well, I used to check the Internet too much while working. I discovered that Lynx can fetch news and not much else, so I decided to use it for my personal browsing at work. It's useful enough to ease my curiosity, and useless enough that I prefer working. Combined with a webpage-blocking browser extension, I can actually complete a decent amount of work during a day. Thanks, Lynx!
- eru 16y agoYou may also want to have a look at links (or links2). (They even support displaying graphics. If started with "links2 -g".)
- rbanffy 16y ago<blink>12:00</blink>
- CWuestefeld 16y agoThat's so 90's. The new thing that technically unsophisticated people do is buy a new HD television and leave the aspect ratio set to stretch their 4:3 picture out to 16:9, making everybody look fat. I think that I can safely say that I've only seen one single wide TV in a home that was not set that way.
- wallflower 16y agoWhile we're talking about <tag> origins: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht... "I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag: IMG" -Marc Andreesen, 25 Feb 93