9 ms·

(2020)

231 points by ghssds 1y ago

bitwize 1y ago
Something else I have to explain to Gen Z existed at one time.
latchkey 1y ago
Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that enabled multiple <title> tags to effectively animate the window title? That was a fun one.
- 9rx 1y ago
  In a similar vein, the little animated messages in the status bar was peak internet.
satiric 1y ago
Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1], has anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in today's world of crazy CSS animations? [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/marquee https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
- seanhunter 1y ago
  The correct use is alongside the “man with a spade”.jpg to let people know your page is under construction.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    "Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!" https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
  Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an actors name when it's too long to fit under their profile pic. Seems like a good use.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Music players, including car radios and portable CD and MiniDisc players, did that around 25 years ago. It's sort-of a standard UI pattern for variable-length text in a fixed-size display.
- bradly 1y ago
  I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some multi-axis marquees for rain effect. [0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)
  - edoceo 1y ago
    Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
  - satiric 1y ago
    I love the use of emoji in that animated scene! I would never have guessed; I only found out from looking at the raw HTML.
- mbo 1y ago
  I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website (https://maxbo.me https://maxbo.me) as a allusion to news tickers (which are themselves an allusion to ticker tape machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS. I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low frame rate. Maybe it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.
- senfiaj 1y ago
  Perhaps better semantics?
- sparkie 1y ago
  They can be useful in a tabbed interface. Since the width of a tab is limited, and may not be large enough to fit in the text, scrolling the text in the active tab title may be better than hovering to show a tooltip (Though we should use the tooltip for the inactive tabs).
yakattak 1y ago
I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.
90s_dev 1y ago
I really need to repurpose 90s.dev asap. And not just to be another neocities. There's so much lost joy and wonder to recover.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  “Username checks out” - Reddit Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.
moralestapia 1y ago
Never got the hate to these. I think some people just want to feel important by diminishing things they see others diminishing, makes up from not having thoughts of one's own. This applies to everything, not just HTML obv.
- k1t 1y ago
  People generally hate things that try to steal their attention away from the thing they are trying to focus on. It doesn't matter if it's a scrolling marquee, an animated gif, some Flash, a movie, a popup, a cookie banner, etc... Generally, moving/animated things grab your attention and people find it annoying.
- DoctorOW 1y ago
  It's really simple, moving text is hard to read. As an example, turn on the local news (bear with me, I work for a TV station). You'll notice the scrolling ticker is likely simplified to focus on one headline at a time, with more pauses in between.
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    So, it's bad on web but good on TV?
    - DoctorOW 1y ago
      The opposite. It's been phased out of TV, (more pauses, less scrolling text) around the same timeframe that it phased out on the web. I threw together a visual comparison: https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b27414bbb93c3cc297f421427.mp4 https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b27414bbb93c3cc297...
      - moralestapia 1y ago
        Wow. Great comparison, thanks!
- xnx 1y ago
neonate 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...
ksymph 1y ago
HN hug of death? https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...
divbzero 1y ago
Interestingly, the default <marquee> doesn’t appear as smooth as a CSS animation would be? Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother: <marquee scrolldelay="50" truespeed>scroll faster than default</marquee>
- flowerbard 1y ago
  They weren’t smooth back then by default either.
- esprehn 1y ago
  In Chromium it's quite literally a CSS animation: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/html_marquee_element.cc;l=241;drc=eac3931ab001973d939a36f424027b3e5f81102a https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi... All the code in that file is a fun read. <marquee> was rewritten as if it was a web component using the public DOM APIs (ex. It uses CSS animations and requestAnimationFrame).
- layer8 1y ago
  I’m pretty sure that originally it was to reduce CPU load, and later was left that way for backwards compatibility.
donatj 1y ago
I was there, 3,000 years ago. I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was bad practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames? I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the server without reloading the page. I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the early 2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders of States on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have a clickable map. I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong and losing their changes on a template update and no way to get it back because no one used version control. I remember <input type=image> and handling where you clicked on an image in the backend. I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still works in Chrome, less reliably in Firefox. I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix just to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that worked somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and everything to become flat and us to not really need it anymore. I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and Silverlight. I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a godsend Firebug was. I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day. 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/map https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- deadbabe 1y ago
  3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they should format Papyrus text.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - SvenL 1y ago
    I think this is a reference to a LotR meme. https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared
    - bornfreddy 1y ago
      For those who prefer not to visit yt, the quote "I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago" refers to Elrond talking about the time when Isildur took the One Ring from Sauron.
TapamN 1y ago
My favorite trick with <marquee> was to nest them, with different, alternating directions. You could make the contents alternate between scrolling and stopping by setting the inner marquee to travel in the opposite direction at the same speed as the outer marquee. Or do more levels with alternating speeds to make it zip around randomly. I think you had to set a max width for the inner marquees for this to work?
flomo 1y ago
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days." > from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla) And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
- atemerev 1y ago
  I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - shawn_w 1y ago
    I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
    - trallnag 1y ago
      It still supports stripped down as blockers. For the casual user something like ublock lite is probably perfectly fine
      - skeeter2020 1y ago
        if you switch between chrome and FF (say work/home) the difference are glarring though...
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      Currently you can still reactivate the ad blocker extensions, it's a bit hidden behind a three dot menu and you have to confirm a scary warning but it's still possible to run u lock origin at the moment. They might disable the workaround later though.
  - flomo 1y ago
4gotunameagain 1y ago
The good old days of writing html on the windows 98 notepad. No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure, healthy, free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.
timpark 1y ago
The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  Yeah, but if someone had used <blonk> you would get... blonking I guess? :) Nice hack!
  - timpark 1y ago
    Exactly, haha! :) Thanks!
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  I do this kind of thing with the Slack client (a silver lining of Electron apps: it’s dead simple) so that I can kill features I don’t like, such as hiding notifications or stopping the signal that I’m writing a message.
- username223 1y ago
  Binary editing was/is good fun. I remember replacing "__gnu_warning" with "__gnu_whining" to quiet some dumb nannying around gets(). Yeah, sure, buffer overruns, but if I'm writing some throwaway program, I can just not overrun the buffer.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to shift the message back into the viewport. What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
- geoffbp 1y ago
  Image of a construction worker digging
  - geoffmunn 1y ago
    also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email' rotating around a globe.
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Yes. And it should be animated as the background image so you can't read any of the normal text in 6 px font without highlighting it.
AndrewStephens 1y ago
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  Where are your visit counter and guestbook?
  - brazzy 1y ago
    Right under the web ring.
- layer8 1y ago
  Don't forget the [NEW]
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  For which browser is this page optimized?
ryanthedev 1y ago
This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.
adamcik 1y ago
A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` around his middle name as a quick and dirty way to test for missing escaping and possible xss. Back in the day this was surprisingly effective at uncovering problems :-)
ajdude 1y ago
I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the animations are done via marquee tags: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/ https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
- al_borland 1y ago
  I probably haven't looked at the marquee tag in 20 years, so I could have just forgotten, but I was unaware it has a direction parameter to allow for vertical scrolling.
- thunderbong 1y ago
  https://no-js.abhij.it/ https://no-js.abhij.it/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
HnUser12 1y ago
Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags. https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php
- chgs 1y ago
  I just applied for an evisa for India. It was horrendous. Pages wouldn’t continue without telling you what was wrong (too many or not enough commas in the address/phone field was one). When returning to the form the pre filled data had quotes in, which then wasn’t valid. Missing labels on fields. Then the hilarious “what countries in the last ten years, list all or get deported” combined with “you have too many countries”. They only allow 20. I don’t know if it’s the state of development in the country as a whole or just the lowest bidder for a government service problem.
  - HnUser12 1y ago
    All of that is true. However, to be fair, these are older sites. The newer ones are generally cleaner and usable[1]. Even the services provided is much more streamlined. https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/ https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/
  - al_borland 1y ago
    This was to prepare you for navigating once there. I still have flashbacks to the Delhi Airport. Every time I turned a corner there was someone there asking to see the name on my itinerary (a random sheet of paper I printed out hat I didn't think I'd actually need) with my passport and ticket. It happened so many times I almost missed my layover.
  - smj-edison 1y ago
    Man, I'm glad that in general form inputs have gotten a lot better. I was reading The Design Of Everyday Things the other day, and it was mentioning how most websites required an exact formatting and didn't provide an explanation...
  - thesuitonym 1y ago
    It's simple, really. You're not allowed into India if you've been to more than 20 countries in the last ten years. What are you trying to hide with all that globetrotting?
jameslk 1y ago
They took away the <blink> tag from us, due to what can only be explained as the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in modern browsers, and late stage capitalism. However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill: https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
InsideOutSanta 1y ago
I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection. I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities because marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody intentionally uses, making it easy to identify when an attack works. I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects of HTML injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it really shouldn't move" is something people understand better than "this text is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."
- precommunicator 1y ago
  When doing HTML sanitization, I always whitelist marquee as an easter egg (and almost nothing else)
- rda2 1y ago
  I browse Hacker News through a custom aggregator. This post is how I found out it’s susceptible to HTML injection - a (2020) was marqueeing across my screen.
  - Sophira 1y ago
    This whole comment section must be absolutely hell to look at on that...
    - rda2 1y ago
      Ironically, it's a titles/links only aggregator. My way of browsing social media antisocially.
  - mgarciaisaia 1y ago
    Same here. You can take a fun look at this for the next ~10 hours until it refreshes with tomorrow's front page: https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn Also: I built the thing, so maybe I should fix it some time.
- llui85 1y ago
  I've always used the <plaintext> tag - an unclosable element that converts the rest of the document into raw HTML. It's very obvious. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/plaintext https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0]. My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface. You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you needed Flash. The space must flow… [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
Theodores 1y ago
One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused. However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page. It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.
K0IN 1y ago
in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is one of the worst things you can do to your users, please don't use this" which they sadly removed. here is the German version: https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425 https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425
dmatech 1y ago
The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still there for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape the argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/blink https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
- arp242 1y ago
  Removing it will cause old code to throw an exception. By making it a no-op the code will remain working. There's tons of old unmaintained stuff on the web.
jabo 1y ago
The day I discovered that marquee tags have a direction attribute, using which you can make the text go up/down left/right and use multiple of these tags, is still etched in my memory.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
A coworker of mine unironically added a marquee tag to an internal tool we were working on. Not as a joke, he just googled how to add scrolling text and copy pasted it, without knowing the history behind it
skeeter2020 1y ago
without the marquee tag how were we supposed to build the scrolling LCD screens that dominated our physical electronics?
mcswell 1y ago
I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/ UAPs that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line up a bunch of drones that can communicate with each other via directional (or just weak) radio or laser transmissions. Then when a drone on one end of the line receives a radar pulse from an aircraft (etc.), it sends back a stronger pulse than its reflection would be, and simultaneously signals the next drone in line. That drone sends off a radar pulse and signals the next drone in line, etc. The effect, as viewed from the aircraft with the radar, would be a somewhat larger (or more reflective) target moving rapidly. The line of drones would not need to be straight, in which case it could simulate a fast-moving object that suddenly turns.
atum47 1y ago
You can put a marquee inside a marquee and make the DVD bouncing logo. Did that on my first day of college, inside an .hta file for windows and blew my classmates minds. #hackerman
globalise83 1y ago
Controversial take: marquee is still useful, and I still use it!
acidburnNSA 1y ago
Ahh, good times. I ran a "college dorm floor" website off my computer for a while and included a 997-word marquee on it, just rambling and talking about girls, depression, and philosophy. At the very end there was an exclamation point that was a href to a hidden page. Of course, someone hit view source to read the stupidly long message and found the page anyway.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Remember clicking on various places to uncover Easter eggs in Homestar Runner?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zzo38computer 1y ago
I think <marquee> is even worse than <blink> (even if you do not use CSS).
yyyk 1y ago
90s web: Blink was used almost entirely for annoyance value - in other worse, all its uses were annoying. Marquee was the slow news ticker at the side you could ignore if you wanted to.
hoseja 1y ago
Nowadays you just reimplement them in CSS.
bwann 1y ago
Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of the requirements was to use IE-only elements on your main website to promote usage of IE. Marquee was one of the least obnoxious ways to do that compared to other options.
shaftway 1y ago
Android also supports a `<blink>` tag in layout XML. It's not documented well, but it's still in the latest source: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/master/core/java/android/view/LayoutInflater.java#942 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
kaiwenwang 1y ago
https://oopsallmarquees.com/ https://oopsallmarquees.com/

231 points by ghssds 1y ago

Something else I have to explain to Gen Z existed at one time.

Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that enabled multiple <title> tags to effectively animate the window title? That was a fun one.

9rx 1y ago
In a similar vein, the little animated messages in the status bar was peak internet.

satiric 1y ago

Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1], has anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in today's world of crazy CSS animations? [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/marquee https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

90s_dev 1y ago
Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
seanhunter 1y ago
The correct use is alongside the “man with a spade”.jpg to let people know your page is under construction.
- bitwize 1y ago
  "Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!" https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction
8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an actors name when it's too long to fit under their profile pic. Seems like a good use.
- layer8 1y ago
  Music players, including car radios and portable CD and MiniDisc players, did that around 25 years ago. It's sort-of a standard UI pattern for variable-length text in a fixed-size display.
bradly 1y ago
I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some multi-axis marquees for rain effect. [0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)
- edoceo 1y ago
  Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
- satiric 1y ago
  I love the use of emoji in that animated scene! I would never have guessed; I only found out from looking at the raw HTML.
mbo 1y ago
I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website (https://maxbo.me https://maxbo.me) as a allusion to news tickers (which are themselves an allusion to ticker tape machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
chrismorgan 1y ago
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS. I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low frame rate. Maybe it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.
senfiaj 1y ago
Perhaps better semantics?
sparkie 1y ago
They can be useful in a tabbed interface. Since the width of a tab is limited, and may not be large enough to fit in the text, scrolling the text in the active tab title may be better than hovering to show a tooltip (Though we should use the tooltip for the inactive tabs).

yakattak 1y ago

I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.

90s_dev 1y ago

I really need to repurpose 90s.dev asap. And not just to be another neocities. There's so much lost joy and wonder to recover.

dgfitz 1y ago
“Username checks out” - Reddit Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.

moralestapia 1y ago

Never got the hate to these. I think some people just want to feel important by diminishing things they see others diminishing, makes up from not having thoughts of one's own. This applies to everything, not just HTML obv.

k1t 1y ago
People generally hate things that try to steal their attention away from the thing they are trying to focus on. It doesn't matter if it's a scrolling marquee, an animated gif, some Flash, a movie, a popup, a cookie banner, etc... Generally, moving/animated things grab your attention and people find it annoying.
DoctorOW 1y ago
It's really simple, moving text is hard to read. As an example, turn on the local news (bear with me, I work for a TV station). You'll notice the scrolling ticker is likely simplified to focus on one headline at a time, with more pauses in between.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  So, it's bad on web but good on TV?
  - DoctorOW 1y ago
    The opposite. It's been phased out of TV, (more pauses, less scrolling text) around the same timeframe that it phased out on the web. I threw together a visual comparison: https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b27414bbb93c3cc297f421427.mp4 https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b27414bbb93c3cc297...
    - moralestapia 1y ago
      Wow. Great comparison, thanks!
xnx 1y ago

neonate 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...

ksymph 1y ago

HN hug of death? https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...

divbzero 1y ago

Interestingly, the default <marquee> doesn’t appear as smooth as a CSS animation would be? Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother: <marquee scrolldelay="50" truespeed>scroll faster than default</marquee>

flowerbard 1y ago
They weren’t smooth back then by default either.
esprehn 1y ago
In Chromium it's quite literally a CSS animation: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/html_marquee_element.cc;l=241;drc=eac3931ab001973d939a36f424027b3e5f81102a https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi... All the code in that file is a fun read. <marquee> was rewritten as if it was a web component using the public DOM APIs (ex. It uses CSS animations and requestAnimationFrame).
layer8 1y ago
I’m pretty sure that originally it was to reduce CPU load, and later was left that way for backwards compatibility.

donatj 1y ago

I was there, 3,000 years ago. I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was bad practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames? I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the server without reloading the page. I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the early 2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders of States on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have a clickable map. I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong and losing their changes on a template update and no way to get it back because no one used version control. I remember <input type=image> and handling where you clicked on an image in the backend. I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still works in Chrome, less reliably in Firefox. I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix just to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that worked somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and everything to become flat and us to not really need it anymore. I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and Silverlight. I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a godsend Firebug was. I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day. 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/map https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

deadbabe 1y ago
3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they should format Papyrus text.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- SvenL 1y ago
  I think this is a reference to a LotR meme. https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    For those who prefer not to visit yt, the quote "I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago" refers to Elrond talking about the time when Isildur took the One Ring from Sauron.

TapamN 1y ago

My favorite trick with <marquee> was to nest them, with different, alternating directions. You could make the contents alternate between scrolling and stopping by setting the inner marquee to travel in the opposite direction at the same speed as the outer marquee. Or do more levels with alternating speeds to make it zip around randomly. I think you had to set a max width for the inner marquees for this to work?

flomo 1y ago

"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days." > from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla) And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.

atemerev 1y ago
I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- shawn_w 1y ago
  I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
  - trallnag 1y ago
    It still supports stripped down as blockers. For the casual user something like ublock lite is probably perfectly fine
    - skeeter2020 1y ago
      if you switch between chrome and FF (say work/home) the difference are glarring though...
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Currently you can still reactivate the ad blocker extensions, it's a bit hidden behind a three dot menu and you have to confirm a scary warning but it's still possible to run u lock origin at the moment. They might disable the workaround later though.
- flomo 1y ago

4gotunameagain 1y ago

The good old days of writing html on the windows 98 notepad. No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure, healthy, free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.

timpark 1y ago

The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!

bornfreddy 1y ago
Yeah, but if someone had used <blonk> you would get... blonking I guess? :) Nice hack!
- timpark 1y ago
  Exactly, haha! :) Thanks!
Waterluvian 1y ago
I do this kind of thing with the Slack client (a silver lining of Electron apps: it’s dead simple) so that I can kill features I don’t like, such as hiding notifications or stopping the signal that I’m writing a message.
username223 1y ago
Binary editing was/is good fun. I remember replacing "__gnu_warning" with "__gnu_whining" to quiet some dumb nannying around gets(). Yeah, sure, buffer overruns, but if I'm writing some throwaway program, I can just not overrun the buffer.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to shift the message back into the viewport. What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing

geoffbp 1y ago
Image of a construction worker digging
- geoffmunn 1y ago
  also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email' rotating around a globe.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Yes. And it should be animated as the background image so you can't read any of the normal text in 6 px font without highlighting it.

AndrewStephens 1y ago

This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!

johannes1234321 1y ago
Where are your visit counter and guestbook?
- brazzy 1y ago
  Right under the web ring.
layer8 1y ago
Don't forget the [NEW]
skeeter2020 1y ago
For which browser is this page optimized?

ryanthedev 1y ago

This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.

adamcik 1y ago

A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` around his middle name as a quick and dirty way to test for missing escaping and possible xss. Back in the day this was surprisingly effective at uncovering problems :-)

ajdude 1y ago

I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the animations are done via marquee tags: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/ https://udel.edu/~ianozi/

al_borland 1y ago
I probably haven't looked at the marquee tag in 20 years, so I could have just forgotten, but I was unaware it has a direction parameter to allow for vertical scrolling.
thunderbong 1y ago
https://no-js.abhij.it/ https://no-js.abhij.it/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

HnUser12 1y ago

Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags. https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php

chgs 1y ago
I just applied for an evisa for India. It was horrendous. Pages wouldn’t continue without telling you what was wrong (too many or not enough commas in the address/phone field was one). When returning to the form the pre filled data had quotes in, which then wasn’t valid. Missing labels on fields. Then the hilarious “what countries in the last ten years, list all or get deported” combined with “you have too many countries”. They only allow 20. I don’t know if it’s the state of development in the country as a whole or just the lowest bidder for a government service problem.
- HnUser12 1y ago
  All of that is true. However, to be fair, these are older sites. The newer ones are generally cleaner and usable[1]. Even the services provided is much more streamlined. https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/ https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/
- al_borland 1y ago
  This was to prepare you for navigating once there. I still have flashbacks to the Delhi Airport. Every time I turned a corner there was someone there asking to see the name on my itinerary (a random sheet of paper I printed out hat I didn't think I'd actually need) with my passport and ticket. It happened so many times I almost missed my layover.
- smj-edison 1y ago
  Man, I'm glad that in general form inputs have gotten a lot better. I was reading The Design Of Everyday Things the other day, and it was mentioning how most websites required an exact formatting and didn't provide an explanation...
- thesuitonym 1y ago
  It's simple, really. You're not allowed into India if you've been to more than 20 countries in the last ten years. What are you trying to hide with all that globetrotting?

jameslk 1y ago

They took away the <blink> tag from us, due to what can only be explained as the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in modern browsers, and late stage capitalism. However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill: https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill

InsideOutSanta 1y ago

I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection. I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities because marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody intentionally uses, making it easy to identify when an attack works. I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects of HTML injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it really shouldn't move" is something people understand better than "this text is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."

precommunicator 1y ago
When doing HTML sanitization, I always whitelist marquee as an easter egg (and almost nothing else)
rda2 1y ago
I browse Hacker News through a custom aggregator. This post is how I found out it’s susceptible to HTML injection - a (2020) was marqueeing across my screen.
- Sophira 1y ago
  This whole comment section must be absolutely hell to look at on that...
  - rda2 1y ago
    Ironically, it's a titles/links only aggregator. My way of browsing social media antisocially.
- mgarciaisaia 1y ago
  Same here. You can take a fun look at this for the next ~10 hours until it refreshes with tomorrow's front page: https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn Also: I built the thing, so maybe I should fix it some time.
llui85 1y ago
I've always used the <plaintext> tag - an unclosable element that converts the rest of the document into raw HTML. It's very obvious. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/plaintext https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0]. My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface. You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you needed Flash. The space must flow… [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

Theodores 1y ago

One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused. However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page. It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.

K0IN 1y ago

in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is one of the worst things you can do to your users, please don't use this" which they sadly removed. here is the German version: https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425 https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425

dmatech 1y ago

The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still there for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape the argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/blink https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

arp242 1y ago
Removing it will cause old code to throw an exception. By making it a no-op the code will remain working. There's tons of old unmaintained stuff on the web.

jabo 1y ago

The day I discovered that marquee tags have a direction attribute, using which you can make the text go up/down left/right and use multiple of these tags, is still etched in my memory.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

A coworker of mine unironically added a marquee tag to an internal tool we were working on. Not as a joke, he just googled how to add scrolling text and copy pasted it, without knowing the history behind it

skeeter2020 1y ago

without the marquee tag how were we supposed to build the scrolling LCD screens that dominated our physical electronics?

mcswell 1y ago

I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/ UAPs that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line up a bunch of drones that can communicate with each other via directional (or just weak) radio or laser transmissions. Then when a drone on one end of the line receives a radar pulse from an aircraft (etc.), it sends back a stronger pulse than its reflection would be, and simultaneously signals the next drone in line. That drone sends off a radar pulse and signals the next drone in line, etc. The effect, as viewed from the aircraft with the radar, would be a somewhat larger (or more reflective) target moving rapidly. The line of drones would not need to be straight, in which case it could simulate a fast-moving object that suddenly turns.

atum47 1y ago

You can put a marquee inside a marquee and make the DVD bouncing logo. Did that on my first day of college, inside an .hta file for windows and blew my classmates minds. #hackerman

globalise83 1y ago

Controversial take: marquee is still useful, and I still use it!

acidburnNSA 1y ago

Ahh, good times. I ran a "college dorm floor" website off my computer for a while and included a 997-word marquee on it, just rambling and talking about girls, depression, and philosophy. At the very end there was an exclamation point that was a href to a hidden page. Of course, someone hit view source to read the stupidly long message and found the page anyway.

bitwize 1y ago
Remember clicking on various places to uncover Easter eggs in Homestar Runner?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zzo38computer 1y ago

I think <marquee> is even worse than <blink> (even if you do not use CSS).

yyyk 1y ago

90s web: Blink was used almost entirely for annoyance value - in other worse, all its uses were annoying. Marquee was the slow news ticker at the side you could ignore if you wanted to.

hoseja 1y ago

Nowadays you just reimplement them in CSS.

bwann 1y ago

Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of the requirements was to use IE-only elements on your main website to promote usage of IE. Marquee was one of the least obnoxious ways to do that compared to other options.

shaftway 1y ago

Android also supports a `<blink>` tag in layout XML. It's not documented well, but it's still in the latest source: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/master/core/java/android/view/LayoutInflater.java#942 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

kaiwenwang 1y ago

https://oopsallmarquees.com/ https://oopsallmarquees.com/