8 ms·
The origins of the blink HTML element
- cek 15y agoI highly recommend you take the time to read Lou's bio. A lot of what is possible on the Web today came from his contributions: http://www.montulli.org/lou http://www.montulli.org/lou
- swombat 15y agothe <blink> tag will probably be remembered as the most hated of all HTML tags I don't know... it's a pretty close race between <blink> and <marquee>...
- blhack 15y agoOh man, <marguee scroll=vertical>Item 1<br>Item 2<br></marquee> I had the coolest news ticket on my angelfire page!
- thelarry 15y agoLife was easier back then
- salimmadjd 15y agoYou're making me nostalgic to the bone...
- vibrunazo 15y agoThere, there. http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=11&url=http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...
- derleth 15y ago> marguee This tague was only implemented by Netsgape Naviguator.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
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- batista 15y agoWhich was the only browser that mattered at the time, anyway...
- jaredsohn 15y agoYour comment deserves a woosh, but this isn't reddit. The parent post was making fun of a spelling error by making similar errors in 'tag', 'Netscape' and 'Navigator'. Your comment is also wrong in that marquee actually originated in Internet Explorer 3. I remember when there were webpages that would blink in Netscape and marquee in Internet Explorer since each browser had its own proprietary annoying tag.
- eru 15y agoPlease pardon my off-topic question. What does `woosh' mean on reddit anyway?
- jaredsohn 15y agoPeople will say 'woosh' if somebody took a joking comment seriously because the humor was too sophisticated. People use this word because it is the sound made when the comment goes over someone's head (here, the comment is treated like an airplane.) Urbandictionary can be a good place to look up this kind of thing, if you read it selectively. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whoosh http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whoosh Also, since I can no longer edit my earlier comment, it was actually derleth's comment that I was factually correcting (although he likely said that because it allowed the joke to work better).
- derleth 15y ago
- jacobr 15y agoInstead of presentational elements, you should use CSS! http://davidwalsh.name/webkit-marquee-css http://davidwalsh.name/webkit-marquee-css http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-marquee/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-marquee/
- Bezvezenator 15y agoAnd let's not forget blinquee http://bugzil.la/163050 http://bugzil.la/163050
- creamyhorror 15y agoNice thread, I laughed at this: http://www.courageunfettered.com/stuf/cheerup/ http://www.courageunfettered.com/stuf/cheerup/ CHEER UP!
- Mjux 15y agoits both. probably the advent of web. good to know all
- gbog 15y agoNo no, those were exceptions, easy too handle. The really most despicable tag is by far the <font> tag, or should I say <FONT>?
- m0nty 15y agoGiven all the JavaScript- and Flash-based assaults on the eye today, the blink tag seems charmingly benign.
- RedwoodCity 15y agoMuch better than the Ad that swings into the middle of the browser screen tag
- Teapot 15y agoAnd animated gifs. They all have thier uses though. It's harder to think anything useful for blink. The cops needs the blink tag for thier emergency ASCII, _<blink>o</blink>___ ____/ _| _ \___ | o o |
- alttag 15y agoSeveral years ago I visited a site that purported to have discovered the only acceptable use for the blink tag: Schrödinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.
- EliAndrewC 15y agoI believe that this is the origin of that joke: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030427 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030427
- endianswap 15y agoIf it were the worst thing we had to deal with nowadays, do you think there'd be a Chrome extension called NoBlink?
- mcpherrinm 15y agoIt's annoying enough that disabling blink is a built-in feature in Firefox
- guccimane 15y ago
- sophacles 15y agoWe had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife. Invent <blink> and meet the wife in one day. I'm pretty sure this qualifies for evil genius...
- unreal37 15y agoKey words being "first wife". Combine that with <blink>, it sounds like it was a bad night all around.
- startupsdesigns 15y ago:) that was really funny.
- prawn 15y agoDidn't read the article, but did it say "first and only"? ;)
- function_seven 15y agoIt did not. Nobody refers to their current wife as "my first wife." If he was still married to her, it would simply be "my wife"
- prawn 15y agoThey may do if they have multiple wives, right? In which case, from the perspective of the husband, it might not have been a bad night all around which was my (poorly made) point.
- jonp 15y agoOne (admittedly rare) counterexample is the late Sir Clement Freud: "We remain together. I call her 'my first wife' to keep her on her toes." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/5165998/Sir-Clement-Freud-I-call-her-my-first-wife-to-keep-her-on-her-toes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/5165998/Sir-Clement-Freud...
- salimmadjd 15y agoOh...the days of blink, frames and animated gif. We thought we were so creative then :)
- DiabloD3 15y agoDon't forget the "mirrored in water" Java applet, loaded 50 times, once for each image.
- salimmadjd 15y agoLOL...the reflection was awesome. Remember the java applet authoring tool macromedia initially released-way before flash?
- emp_ 15y agoSomewhat relevant http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3854047 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3854047
- kprobst 15y agoDon't forget the eponymous "Under construction" animated gif. The halcyon days of web design.
- commanderkeen08 15y agoDon't forget the "tables" used for layout. Oh wait, my bank still does this. Oh wait, so does Yale University.
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- hammerbrostime 15y agoI have to say, I find the blink tag to be quaint form of vulgar web design. I'm rather disappointed that it isn't supported by webkit. At least animated gifs still work http://www.lingscars.com/ http://www.lingscars.com/
- thought_alarm 15y agoThe <hype> tag, another undocumented easter egg, sadly didn't catch on in the same way.
- rangibaby 15y agoWhat did that acutally do? JWZ teased about it[1] as part of the things he posted for Mozilla's 10th anniversary. [1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...
- Sniffnoy 15y agoLou Montulli says in a Slashdot comment[1] that the tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?" (Now who is Marca? I'm guessing Marc Andreesen? I assume he intended this to be clear from context but I'm not familiar with these people.) [1] http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507112&cid=22931140 http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507112&cid=2293...
- ralfd 15y agohttp://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507112&cid=22933110 http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507112&cid=2293... > The tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?"
- rangibaby 15y agoA search for that phrase led me to this: http://www.totic.org/ http://www.totic.org/ Mystery solved! :-)
- self 15y agoI didn't know about the hype tag, but for a really long time, at least on the Unix Navigator, you could type "about:hype" into the location bar and it would play marca's audio.
- altcognito 15y agoInteresting that the blink tag never made it into Lynx since it should have been relatively trivial given that there is an ANSI escape sequence for it. I have fond memories of dialing up a BBS with dramatic blinking warnings and ANSI style art that had elaborate blinking designs.
- latchkey 15y agoAnyone remember animated <title> tags? You put a bunch of them into the document and the browser would render them one by one. So disturbing.
- guccimane 15y agoYup, also animated status bar text.
- thrownaway2424 15y ago"Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office..."
- redthrowaway 15y agoIf you watch Code Rush, which I highly recommend, you'll see that they worked crazilly hard at Netscape back in the day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig
- js2 15y agoI found the tag so offensive that I used to "emacs the binary" (Netscape) and null out the "blink" string. This was quite effective.
- rachelbythebay 15y agoThis was also a great way to stop GIF animations from looping. A quick mangling of the string it looked for to find the extensions would let them play through once but not repeat.
- mingfu 15y agoLou is my boss. I could try to get him on here to answer any questions people may have if enough interest.
- vinayan3 15y agoThe guy who went and implemented is a true hacker. He deserves applause. Everyone has those conversations where people say wouldn't this be funny. That guy did it and will forever live in the annuals of HTML. I should unleash a practical joke of my own...
- ianisborn 15y agoI worked with the engineer he mentions. Really low-key guy, a grizzled veteran of the internet.
- doug1001 15y agoOh, well. The important thing is that humankind has evolved since then: Never embed an animation effect in our markup.Today's web designer understands separation of content, presentation, and behavior. To 'blink', create a jQuery plug-in A second and just-as-important lesson: never use blinking animation by itself. For maximum aesthetic appeal, use blink in precise syncronicity with the other core web site building blocks--pulsate, throb, flicker, and strobe.
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- downx3 15y agoSemantically it might have been better authored as the 'pester' element, with blinking being one implementation.
- eru 15y agoYes. But this was the age of font-tags.
- downx3 15y agoI thought it might have been inspired to mimic a cursor blink. But no.