Some killjoys have removed the blink tag from Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Some killjoys have removed the blink tag from Firefox

jwz.org

309 pointsmfincham146 comments

I fixed blink in Mozilla twice (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89065) in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. The first time it broke was a result of Dave Hyatt's rewrite of the style system; I always suspected he had broken it on purpose. The second time seemed like it was just a mistake.

Anyways, a sad day.

I'd actually love to hear more about your fixes, your suspicions and your feelings about blink's removal. The anthropology of the internet is fascinating to me and it sounds like you would have a pretty unique perspective on this. Either here or a blog or whatever, I'd love to know more.

There's not a lot to say. I didn't have any huge role in the project, although the experience working on it was hugely influential in the way I thought about programming. Maybe I'll write it up some day.

As for Hyatt, it just seemed like something he would do as a joke. Blink was a ridiculous feature, but it was a standard, which was a wedge that Mozilla leaned on heavily in those days.

You can put jwz's blink in your browser profile's userContent.css to make it work on all websites:

  @keyframes         blink {
    0% { opacity:1; } 75% { opacity:1; } 76% { opacity:0; } 100% { opacity:0; }}

  blink {
    text-decoration:   inherit;
    animation:         blink 0.75s ease-in infinite alternate;
  }

(Though it will work a little differently than the native <blink>, as the CSS makes non-text elements blink as well.)

The problem framed by JWZ is not a technical one. It is a social one, and centered upon values. Eliminating <blink> changes the existing content of the web. There's a reasonable argument that that is a bad thing - again one based on values not technology.

To put it another way, <blink> has meaning by virtue of its history. Its presence on a page says something to the viewer - not something technical but something cultural.

<blink>'s removal does not make the web richer or more meaningful. Instead, its removal does something quite the opposite.

I won't say that it is vandalism - but it does wantonly alter the expression of existing web content, and does so to the very content that is most in danger of being lost to history. It neuters what makes some web pages representative of their time and place.

> To put it another way, <blink> has meaning by virtue of its history.

I agree. The Book of Mozilla stated: "Their tags shall blink until the end of days", and they are now violating the scripture.

On the other hand, the tag has been on it's way out since IE started catching on in 1998. So very few will notice their apostasy.

Or, the end of days is upon us.

I think we shouldn't expect historic pages to work in modern browsers. As long as we can reliably run older browsers we can also view historic pages as they were once rendered.

We absolutely should expect historic pages to work in modern browsers (you want to just wantonly throw away history for no good reason?) And you absolutely cannot reliably run older browsers. This logic doesn't even work out right- So, once all the servers in the world break backwards compatibility with the old browsers (thus making them absolutely incapable of being run on modern networks), THEN we should go back to our modern browsers, and make them render the old pages again, after we dropped support. What?

What about pages that are intended to look like historic pages, because they are e.g. paying tribute to them, or mirroring how far a programmer has come from when he first started using the Internet.

I think there's enough cruft on today's bloated Internet that the blink tag is hardly a significant step in a right direction.

What old browsers can we still run reliably? Serious question.

Any. That's what VMs are for.

So johnny six pack who made a web site for his crochet club back in 1997 using microsoft front page is going to fire up a VM and install an old browser to look at it? uh huh.

Yes, much like I can never visit a faraway country because I can't pilot a plane.

So I need to have the level of skill needed to pilot a plane just to look at my old family photos, drawings and poetry? And you make products with the expectation from your customers, perhaps?

"Trust me with your data, I am a technologist. It's okay, I'll take care of it. Though I will expect you to fire up a VM if you still care about it 10 years from now."

And statically linked binaries, if necessary.

I agree that we shouldn't expect it.

Not expecting it is not the same as not wanting it - and the demise of <blink> is an expression of wants - or rather want nots.

It'd be interesting if we saw a browser actually version-compatibility break, in the sense of "HTML5 supported, HTML4 won't even render."

Lots of mediums have gone extinct - tapes, punch cards, what not. To view them now, one has to get a capable device. Maybe to see some old web sites in all their glory we just need to download Mosaic again. Perhaps someone will even make a Javascript emulator of Mosaic. It happened for other things, like C64 games.

I think something can be said for getting rid of useless stuff in a codebase.

This is right on. Bring back the blink tag

www.iwantmyblinktagback.com

I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to add a userstyle for having <blink> back. Actually... I think I'll do just that.

Blink's removal makes the Web less likely to make people sick. Epileptics have a terrible time with flashing things.

Thank god we can finally blink non-text elements. The glorious HTML5/CSS3 future is upon is.

https://github.com/wearefractal/blink-polyfill is more comprehensive

Just an FYI: you can use step timing functions to obviate the need for the 1% change hack :).

Technically, this isn't the right solution, but I appreciate the suggestion. Firefox should honor HTML standard and add it back, and add an option in about::config or some other dialog and disable it there if they think it should be disabled by default.

Blink was never a standard. Lou Montulli thought up the idea while drunk and then someone else implemented it for a joke.

"When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet. Then somewhere, somehow the arcane knowledge of blinking leaked into the real world and suddenly everything was blinking. "Look here", "buy this", "check this out", all blinking. Large advertisements blinking in all their glory. It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.

In the end, much was said, most of it in the form of flaming posts to various discussion boards, and the <blink> tag will probably be remembered as the most hated of all HTML tags. I would like to publicly state that at no time did I actually write code or even seriously advocate for the <blink> tag. It is true that I put forth the initial inspiration, but it really was merely a thought experiment. I am not going to name any names of the people who coded the dastardly deed, if they wish to step forward, they will need to do it themselves."

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

Also, firefox used to have an option in about:config to allow the blink tag to be turned off.

<blink> as the most hated?

what about <marquee>?

It's not in any HTML standard, but strangely there is a joke DTD on w3.org with BLINK: http://www.w3.org/Style/HTML40-plus-blink.dtd

On the other hand, "text-decoration: blink" (which has also been killed in Firefox) is standard CSS (although the standard does go on to kind-of suggest not implementing it...)

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#lining-striking-props

I suggest you read this :) http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat

Adding another option to about:config that most users will never need or see does not cause cognitive load in any real sense.

Perhaps consider the open-closed principle and whether it should be a setting or a third-party extension.

The humor of this joke is in how many people (perhaps including its author!) take it seriously.

Thing is, back in the day, blink did have its uses...

    <blink><font color="red">"If you click continue, 
    your database will be irretrievably deleted, your 
    children shipped off to coal mines, and your tea 
    served lukewarm."</font></blink>

Even corporate intranets loved it: http://forums.asp.net/post/433145.aspx

It worked!

Fear not! I brought blink back at http://terribleideas.neocities.org/ (and a bunch of other really terrible tags, like <shudder/>).

Animated HUGE <hr> gifs would be cool too.

EDIT: And spinning animated bullet-points.

Did "Hot Dog Stand" have any legitimate use? How did it end up being delivered? EDIT: Apparently, useful for monochrome displays and some forms of colourblindness, according to a comment here (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/07/a-tribute-to-the-wi...)

Am I the only one who liked the Program Manager and the windows-minimise-to-the-desktop behaviour of win3.x? It seems like every other bizarre idea has been implemented in a window manager somewhere except that one. Or am I wrong?

I saw something quite similar to minimize to desktop in one of those super light linux WMs that lack a task bar.

ROX-Filer can do that.

Great stuff! I love a good satire. It's amazing what you can do with css there days. Especially <sparkle> is impressive. I also love that you used neocities. Who doesn't miss the 90s, right?

<sparkle> is implemented with just an animated gif background. Still, great stuff!

Satire?

Amazing! This is hands down this year's most important development in the Web technologies field!

Is it to early to call this Web4.0?

You forgot marquee!

Do you really not like epileptics?

love how you're hosting this on neocities, seems apt

it's actually hard to read blinking text - it's missing from the screen half the time!

It's actually blinking just 1/4 of the time

It should be off only 1/4 of the time, but IIRC it was often not implemented correctly, and it would sometimes be 2-on,2-off instead of 3-on,1-off.

Mandatory link:

"The Origins of the <Blink> Tag" http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

It's surprisingly interesting and written by the person with the original idea!

Drunk coders, awesome. Also I wonder who leaked, or found out, the tag first.

Small correction, St. James Infirmary was on Moffett Blvd, how I loved that place before it burned down.

Haha amazing, who knew blink had such a story behind it...

Ty for the link

Killjoys? Nay, bloody sodding wankers, the lot of them! Removing the <blink> tag is about as heart-warming an event as taking Old Yeller out back and putting a bullet through his brain. This is a travesty, pure and simple.

" as heart-warming an event as taking Old Yeller out back and putting a bullet through his brain."

Minus the rabies.

No, I think it's about right.

first they came for the <blink> tag...

Right! What's next, the <marquee> tag?!?!?? Do these people known no mercy!?!

I don't want to live in that world.

Grandpa! Grandpa! Tells us the story of the Great Neckbeard War of 2013, when Arch-Duke Blinkentag was murdered!

I only have one upvote to give... it's not enough. It's just... it's not enough.

Don't worry, we can replace that with CSS too: http://html5advent2011.digitpaint.nl/14/

marquee's already gone in FF isn't it?

Blink is a visual annoyance, but it's nothing compared to the retina bleaching caused by jwz's site.

Once upon a time, green-on-black was the best thing available, and to programmers my and jwz's age, it was THE FUTURE.

But to this generation, it's denigrated as "retina bleach".

> But to this generation, it's denigrated as "retina bleach".

Given that I'm 49, this feels like being carded at 7-11.

I think the difference is screen resolution and intensity. I could sit at an old green screen for hours with no retina bleach. But jwz's site, even with the same color scheme, feels so much more intense than the screens of yore.

There's a lot of cyan on the site, which I think is a significant part of the difference.

Eesh, which reminded me of some MUDs where they went crazy with the colours; cyan and magenta nightmares they were.

Most LCD's today produce extreme amounts of light. I usually run mine at ~50% brightness during the day and 0% at night.

copypasta of my comment:

try using f.lux, a program that changes your monitor's white temp. depending on the time of day. http://justgetflux.com/

f.lux definitely helps, but it'd be awesome if all monitors adopted a standard protocol (perhaps something over HDMI-CEC) for controlling backlight brightness as well. Sometimes it's not quite enough just to turn down the blue.

My TV (which I use for a monitor) has a light sensor on it which automatically adjusts the brightness based on the amount of light in the room. It's smart, more screens should do this. Phones do it too.

I prefer my screens very dark at all times though so I turn it off and just keep the brightness to low all the time. I have really sensitive eyes, I can't go outside without sunglasses, even when its cloudy.

Combine that with discontinuing PWM controlled brightness. Some monitors can flicker badly, especially while warming up. http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pulse_width_modulation....

Everyone knows amber-on-black was the only acceptable terminal configuration. :)

The Bloomberg Terminal kindly reminds you s/was/is :)

Woah! Careful tiger - you're running the risk of starting a holy war with the green-on-black terminal crowd there! But then, we need a new holy war, now that vi has clearly won over emacs...

Said to be most ergonomic. The warm color has since been found to be more pleasing in the evening.

After I gave up on compiz (negative plugin) due to bugs, I made a night-time stylesheet that converts white pages to orange on almost black, on a hotkey. Using it now to save my eyes from blinding light.

try using f.lux, a program that changes your monitor's white temp. depending on the time of day.

http://justgetflux.com/

I do use that on Windows. But I find white pages intolerable at night and so it is not enough to change them to off white.

Can you share? I could really use that.

I'm currently using the Custom Buttons extension in Firefox to execute the script at:

http://pastebin.com/9wWg1Ssw

There is also a nice bookmarklet called invert-lightness I like a lot, however it is resource intensive on complicated pages as it must traverse the entire dom. So, I don't use it as much:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/color.html

Thanks man, I appreciate it.

I grew up with white on blue. The non-bright intensities, that is. Very good during daytime light levels on a CRT. http://mindprod.com/utility/sa!.txt

no the one true terminal is the VT100 - with the clicky sound turned on a touch typist sounded like a reenactment of the st valentines day massacre.

We even went and brought the official DEC schematics so our electronics shop could fix the rs232 isolators them when a nearby lightning strike took them out.

long cable runs under a metal roof

I have just changed it to this... and I'm not sure I can go back.

Thank you mpyne!

I'd wager most who hate green on black don't spend much time in terminals. I'd be blind by now if they were locked to black on white.

Sure, but the typical green-on-black terminal from days of yore is very, very, different than jwz's blog page on a modern monitor... I don't know whether it's strictly the color of those old phosphors or other physical attributes of the displays, but it's like night and day.

[I was a particular fan of the H29, a soft yellowish grassy green, it was cheerful without being grating, just great to use. Also a good feeling detachable keyboard, lots of nice stuff.]

Agreed that the difference is like night and day. I also remember the black of the green-on-black terminals was "lighter" somehow, so that there was less contrast between the black and the green. The lower contrast definitely saves on my eyes.

I approximate this in iTerm2 by setting my background to RGB (0, 39, 0), and foreground to RGB (26, 223, 0).

Probably not perfect, but I found it works fine with a MBP non-retina built-in as well as an external LCD.

I spend basically all day in a terminal, but green on black is still pretty grating. I use http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized (the dark version), which is quite pleasant - most text is a light grey, and the background is a very dark blue. In general, though, I find that light on dark is much easier on the eyes than black on white. That's how my Kindle Fire is set up, too.

I've used a real green-on-black VT-220 and it nearly blinded me when I looked away after a few hours. Everything looked purple.

What's wrong with e.g. #ddd on #222?

For me, the same thing that's wrong with #222 on #222 - harder to see. In seriousness, it's easy on the eyes but doesn't seem nearly as clear as green.

The VT100s I worked on were all off-whitish-bluish, not green. Also, some ambers.

But they all had raster lines.

So, if the future doesn't have raster lines, it's not the future.

There's a normalizing scriptlet bookmark I got from here on HN:

    javascript:(function(){function R(w){try{var d=w.document,j,i,t,T,N,b,r=1,C;for(j=0;t=["object","embed","applet","iframe"][j];++j){T=d.getElementsByTagName(t);for(i=T.length-1;(i+1)&&(N=T[i]);--i)if(j!=3||!R((C=N.contentWindow)?C:N.contentDocument.defaultView)){b=d.createElement("div");b.style.width=N.width; b.style.height=N.height;b.innerHTML="<del>"+(j==3?"third-party "+t:t)+"</del>";N.parentNode.replaceChild(b,N);}}}catch(E){r=0}return r}R(self);var i,x;for(i=0;x=frames[i];++i)R(x)})(); javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='* { background: white ! important; color: black !important; text-shadow: none !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })(); javascript:(function(){var d=document; function K(N,w) { var nn = d.createElement(w), C = N.childNodes, i; for(i=C.length-1;i>=0;--i) nn.insertBefore(C[i],nn.childNodes[0]); N.parentNode.replaceChild(nn,N); } function Z(t,w) { var T = document.getElementsByTagName(t), j; for (j=T.length-1;j>=0;--j) K(T[j],w); } Z("blink", "span"); Z("marquee", "div"); })(); javascript:(function(){var H=["mouseover","mouseout","unload","resize"],o=window.opera; if(document.addEventListener/*MOZ*/&&!o) for(j in H)document.addEventListener(H[j],function(e){e.stopPropagation();},true); else if(window.captureEvents/*NS4*/&&!o) { document.captureEvents(-1/*ALL*/);for(j in H)window["on"+H[j]]=null;} else/*IE*/ {function R(N){var i,x;for(j in H)if(N["on"+H[j]]/*NOT TEXTNODE*/)N["on"+H[j]]=null;for(i=0;x=N.childNodes[i];++i)R(x);}R(document);}})(); javascript:(function() { var c, tID, iID; tID = setTimeout(function(){}, 0); for (c=1; c<1000 && c<=tID; ++c) clearTimeout(tID - c); iID = setInterval(function(){},1000); for (c=0; c<1000 && c<=iID; ++c) clearInterval(iID - c); })();(function(){ var imgs = document.getElementsByTagName('img'); for(var i=0; i < imgs.length; i++) { imgs[i].style.visibility='hidden';}})();

Wish I could credit the source.

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

The best use of this I've seen was someone wrapping the entire Wikipedia article on the blink tag, in the blink tag.

Does anybody have the firefox devs discussion on this matter. Blink was my favorite indigo child of tags. When clients wanted more attention to a div i would blink it, and they would quickly realize the error of their ways.

Really? Mine always thought it looked great

Not sure if he's joking or not. In other circumstances I would immediately take it as a joking but this guy has been seriously complaining about removing crappy features that should have been killed decades ago: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...

In the above he was complaining about the removal of glBegin/glEnd from OpenGL ES (and depracating it in OpenGL 3.0+). It was a convenience feature that might have made sense back in 1992 when OpenGL was introduced but with the advent of consumer graphics hardware in the late 90's, glBegin/glEnd was essentially the reason for a 100x performance drop.

(if you're wondering whether I'm joking or not: yes I am, except for the 100x perf drop)

Now, the only "valid use of the blink tag"[1] will work again.

[1] http://blink.tylian.net/

Someone collapsed the waveform! http://www.schrodingerscatis.com/

Discussion from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170392

The author of the article is JWZ:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jwz

And there's a history:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/comp...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213625

Thanks! I didn't see anything about that on his site. That makes it a tad more personal

WHAT'S NEXT?!?? REMOVING...

  <font face="comic sans ms">???</font>

???

Which has been standardised for ages, but deprecated for a while.

Now we need a new semantic tag to indicate content will be annoying that we can style with css however we like. I propose we reuse the blink tag for that purpose.

<blink>The new iphone is rumoured to...</blink> <blink>Version 0.1.2 of xyzscript has just been released...</blink>

This isn't progress.

It's just change.

Blink never hurt anyone.

Have you forgotten how annoying the web used to be?

The original form of my comment was:

  (...)

  (...)

  (But for the sake of ideology.)

  (...)

As demonstrated by the argument that blink deserves elimination because of the past, the big rationale is punishment - premised upon anthropomorphizing an HTML tag.

What I remember about the days of blink is fucking amazing the web was. The driving ideal was connecting everything to everything else - not creating gated communities of cul-de-sacs. What was far more annoying than blink was auto-playing music.

Now in fairness, if the web has ceased to be a source of annoyance since, I must not have noticed. Was there a memo?

compared to today's web (when used without an ad-blocker)? there are huge moving, sliding, wiggling, popping animations everywhere.

Blink can cause epileptic seizures.

if you read the comments thread on jwz's site there's a discussion that concludes that blink doesn't blink fast enough to cause seizures- There's specific MIL specs they cite.

My favorite use of <BLINK> http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html

I guess safari has already removed support for this tag? I get no blinking cursor on this page :o(

Blink was a non-standard tag added to Netscape. Presto supported it because Opera tried to support everything. Trident and KHTML/WebKit/Blink never supported it.

Blink doesn't support blink?

> <blink> support should be dropped for one release out of every four.

Thanks for the laugh.

I think that completely killing the blink tag is a bit extreme given that its core implementation could simply have been replaced by a CSS polyfill.

So now the blink tag will appear in some browsers but not in others? Fear not, the blink tag lives on. If not in Firefox, then in the irony.

Firefox was the last browser that still supported it.

I don't care what you say, there is no rhyme or reason for browsers to keep dropping <blink> support while all of them continue to support <marquee> (though it's probably just a matter of time?)

So I for science I tried applying "shudder linear 0.1s 0s infinite" to the <body> tag. It may be because I'm hungover but I came very close to throwing up.

I always thought that <blink> should be implemented by alternating between a high and low intensity color. That way it's not invisible 30% of the time when you're reading it. I suspect if it had been done this way, it would have been seen as far less offensive.

If you have a problem and you think that the blink tag is the solution, now you have two problems.

Someone needs to hold a funeral for it. One of those funerals where people throw a party.

My work around that operates more like the original (i.e. does not cause img's to flash), built with AngularJS - https://github.com/RobK/angular-blink

Makes sense there would be a MILSPEC for blinking but avoiding seizures. If you have an LCD that can only show blank or numbers, the only visual way it has to warn you about something, like a number being too high, is to blink.

And the obligatory t-shirt to express my feelings about this http://www.cafepress.com/hackernewsswag/10307694

https://github.com/samgranger/blink.js

User agent check still needs to be removed and replaced with something better

I'd honestly take blinking text over overt Flash ads any day...

What about the view counter on my Geocity site? I would look at it everyday to see if someone happened to stumble on my site.

Put this in your CSS:

   blink {
     animation: fade-in-out 1s steps(1,end) infinite alternate;
    }

I don't get it - can't we just implement the same effect in JS if we need blink that badly?

since "the killjoys" (actually quite accurate in this case) AT WIKIPEDIA won't let me put the words 'LUDICROUS SPEED' in blink tags or capitals on the Spaceballs article, what's the point in having it anyway?

Don't see how the blink tag would be much use though..

pfft. Javascript timers are more accurate anyway. Nyah nyah Mozilla.

Thank goodness!

Epileptics don't need to use the Web anyway. /s

I learned something interesting from a comment on the post:

"I was a neuro tech for a long time, doing tests for epilepsy. A 1Hz blink can trigger a seizure, but only in a vanishingly small number of epileptics and only if it's sustained - photosensitive epileptics (far from all epileptics) usually need at least 8-10Hz strobing before epileptic activity rises. The common range is ~12-16.

All this being said, have a 3:1 duty cycle is better UX anyway - the blink off works as the attention-grabbing highlight, and the longer duration on allows what's highlighted to be more easily read."

Looks like you don't need to worry :-D

The fact it's possible at all means it's not worth it.

> The fact it's possible at all means it's not worth it.

So having a feature which is widely agreed to be impossible to use tastefully is worth possible headaches and seizures in some people?

One less reason to use Firefox

Someone give them a fucking medal.

Why? Did they just win a f--king contest? I didn't know they ran those, it ought to be an Olympic sport, eh?

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