The Origin of the <blink> Tag | Hacker News Reader

The Origin of the <blink> Tag

montulli.org

158 pointsbkrausz32 comments

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Huh.

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

My 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.

He 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.)

Not sure. He said his first wife. Who knows how many wives he had...

The number of wives will probably be dwarfed by the number of nights out.

And actually: Meeting your first wife for the first time can't be repeated.

I'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!

You may also want to have a look at links (or links2).

(They even support displaying graphics. If started with "links2 -g".)

The 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.

In most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful.

...at least in the case of <marquee>, precisely because it's annoying.

Minor bug report: The url has > & < stripped rather than escaped, so I needed to resubmit with the > & < replaced with > and <

While we're talking about <tag> origins:

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

Thanks, I actually have more respect for them knowing this was a practical joke and not a seriously advocated feature.

I always assumed IBM or someone requested it as part of the bundled 3270 emulator.

This 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

Seems to be on purpose on the Chrome/Chromium team's part. Fortunately, there's a userscript workaround! http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/74241

I 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.

Yeah I'm really curious about the story behind the <marquee> tag now.

That 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.

I 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.

That'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.

CNN is always shown this way in airports and I fly so much that it now looks normal to me.

I assume my brain has learned to compensate.

Sure. But you can't say that with a blink tag ;-)

Interesting 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.

The engineer who implemented it has been in hiding since the late 90s.

Somehow 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_...

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.)

Previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961266

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439403

Weird that it didn't get filtered out by the HN de-duping. Something to do with the > & <?

HN's de-duping will only reject articles that are still in memory, which is generally articles that have been viewed fairly recently.

Good thing it got resubmitted, because those 2 have 2 votes each

Amazing what a realitively slow news day will do for some resubmitted news articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com

The Origin of the &lt;blink&gt; Tag

The Origin of the <blink> Tag