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Comment by mcav | Hacker News Reader

All snark aside, I wonder what the rationale was for doing this. It'd be a shame to load a website in a browser 20 years from now, only to see the site render incorrectly due to no-longer-implemented tags. Next, <center>?

It's tough, obviously, because we can't have cruft build up all over. But this seems like a fairly straightforward case that a browser could shim out in JavaScript by default. Blink is a pretty straightforward piece of internet history. It's not like <applet>, which, while also a piece of history, actually carries legitimate complexity/security risks.

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Gecko was, afaik, the last major browser engine that supported <blink>. Chrome and IE don't, at least. Opera won't, after switching to, ironically enough, the engine called Blink.

So it's not exactly the same as removing <center>: Other browsers already didn't support it.

Oddly enough Chrome/Blink still has the String.prototype.blink method to create a blink tag from a string. If I recall correctly it's actually part of an ES (not DOM) standard.

Wow. Because this surprised me so much, I just found out that if you open up a node REPL and type 'hello'.blink() you get '<blink>Hello</blink>' returned. So I guess it's an ES thing and it boggles my mind.

I was trying to find the ES standard where it's specified but I'll settle for this[1] instead. Interestingly enough you have quite a few HTML wrapping functions as part of the spec.

[1]: http://javascript.spec.whatwg.org/#string.prototype.blink

What could possibly be the use of that.

    <p style="color: red">
    <script>
        var str="&bull;";
        document.write(str.blink());
    </script>
    </p>

That would make a blinking red dot. It'd be good for status lights, I guess.

There were parameters threaded throughout random layout functions to record how long things were supposed to blink for. It was a maintenance burden.

Why would that be? Do blinked things ever leave the flow? I didn't think so, so layout should be unaffected.

Keep a VM with a vintage browser along for the ride, I have a feeling blink tags won't be the only thing different in 20 years.

I'm sure if it becomes well and truly missed, someone will make an add-on to interpret them properly.

You can do that in a user CSS stylesheet: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13955163/imitating-a-blin...

The <center> tag has been deprecated for 13 years.

As far as I'm aware, the longest deprecated HTML elements are XMP, LISTING and PLAINTEXT: first deprecated in the IIIR HTML draft (Jun '93).

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