The origins of the blink HTML element | Hacker News Reader

The origins of the blink HTML element

montulli.org

237 pointsjacobr66 comments

We 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...

Key words being "first wife". Combine that with <blink>, it sounds like it was a bad night all around.

hahaha, nice :)

:) that was really funny.

Didn't read the article, but did it say "first and only"? ;)

It 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"

One (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...

They 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.

Given all the JavaScript- and Flash-based assaults on the eye today, the blink tag seems charmingly benign.

And 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 |

Several 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.

I believe that this is the origin of that joke: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030427

Much better than the Ad that swings into the middle of the browser screen tag

If it were the worst thing we had to deal with nowadays, do you think there'd be a Chrome extension called NoBlink?

It's annoying enough that disabling blink is a built-in feature in Firefox

Perhaps, but those allow us to do things we otherwise couldn't. The blink tag just made annoying blinky text.

the <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>...

Oh man, <marguee scroll=vertical>Item 1<br>Item 2<br></marquee>

I had the coolest news ticket on my angelfire page!

You're making me nostalgic to the bone...

There, there.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...

Instead of presentational elements, you should use CSS!

http://davidwalsh.name/webkit-marquee-css http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-marquee/

Life was easier back then

> marguee

This tague was only implemented by Netsgape Naviguator.

Which was the only browser that mattered at the time, anyway...

Your 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.

Please pardon my off-topic question. What does `woosh' mean on reddit anyway?

People 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

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).

The usual spelling is whoosh, by the way.

And let's not forget blinquee http://bugzil.la/163050

Nice thread, I laughed at this:

http://www.courageunfettered.com/stuf/cheerup/

CHEER UP!

No no, those were exceptions, easy too handle. The really most despicable tag is by far the <font> tag, or should I say <FONT>?

its both. probably the advent of web.

good to know all

Interesting 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.

The 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...

Anyone remember animated <title> tags? You put a bunch of them into the document and the browser would render them one by one. So disturbing.

Yup, also animated status bar text.

The <hype> tag, another undocumented easter egg, sadly didn't catch on in the same way.

What 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-brows...

Lou 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=2293...

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507112&cid=2293...

> The tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?"

I 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.

A search for that phrase led me to this: http://www.totic.org/

Mystery solved! :-)

Lou is my boss. I could try to get him on here to answer any questions people may have if enough interest.

I worked with the engineer he mentions. Really low-key guy, a grizzled veteran of the internet.

"Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office..."

If 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

Semantically it might have been better authored as the 'pester' element, with blinking being one implementation.

Yes. But this was the age of font-tags.

Oh...the days of blink, frames and animated gif. We thought we were so creative then :)

Don't forget the "mirrored in water" Java applet, loaded 50 times, once for each image.

Somewhat relevant http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3854047

LOL...the reflection was awesome. Remember the java applet authoring tool macromedia initially released-way before flash?

Don't forget the eponymous "Under construction" animated gif. The halcyon days of web design.

Which is why I think it is rather humours that Jquery is using it on their plugin page. http://plugins.jquery.com/

Don't forget the "tables" used for layout.

Oh wait, my bank still does this. Oh wait, so does Yale University.

Also, the only way to use the "remaining" space when you have two fixed width columns inside a bigger div IIRC :P

display: (table | table-cell | table-row);

Same layout functionality, no abuse of HTML semantics.

Oh wait, so does Hacker News

I 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

Oh, 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.

I 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/

It can with a bit of CSS magic: https://gist.github.com/75603244b7e96ecb0bd2

Truly evil.

I found the tag so offensive that I used to "emacs the binary" (Netscape) and null out the "blink" string. This was quite effective.

This 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.

I thought it might have been inspired to mimic a cursor blink. But no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com