

The origins of the blink HTML element - jacobr
http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

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sophacles
_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...

~~~
unreal37
Key words being "first wife". Combine that with <blink>, it sounds like it was
a bad night all around.

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

~~~
function_seven
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"

~~~
jonp
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...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/5165998/Sir-Clement-Freud-I-call-
her-my-first-wife-to-keep-her-on-her-toes.html)

------
m0nty
Given all the JavaScript- and Flash-based assaults on the eye today, the blink
tag seems charmingly benign.

~~~
Teapot
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 |

~~~
alttag
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.

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

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swombat
_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>...

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

I had the _coolest_ news ticket on my angelfire page!

~~~
derleth
> marguee

This tague was only implemented by Netsgape Naviguator.

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

~~~
jaredsohn
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.

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

~~~
jaredsohn
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).

------
altcognito
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.

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vinayan3
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...

------
latchkey
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.

~~~
guccimane
Yup, also animated status bar text.

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

~~~
rangibaby
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...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-
day/)

~~~
Sniffnoy
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=22931140)

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

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

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thrownaway2424
"Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office..."

~~~
redthrowaway
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>

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downx3
Semantically it might have been better authored as the 'pester' element, with
blinking being one implementation.

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

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

~~~
DiabloD3
Don't forget the "mirrored in water" Java applet, loaded 50 times, once for
each image.

~~~
emp_
Somewhat relevant <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3854047>

------
cek
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>

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doug1001
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_.

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hammerbrostime
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/>

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

~~~
chris_wot
Truly evil.

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js2
I found the tag so offensive that I used to "emacs the binary" (Netscape) and
null out the "blink" string. This was quite effective.

~~~
rachelbythebay
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.

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downx3
I thought it might have been inspired to mimic a cursor blink. But no.

