

The Origin of the &lt;blink&gt; Tag - bkrausz
http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe&lt;blink&gt;tag

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Groxx
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>

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dagw
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.

~~~
eru
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.)

~~~
senki
Not sure. He said his _first_ wife. Who knows how many wives he had...

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

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

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jakevoytko
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!

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

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

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jgrahamc
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.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_In most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful._

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

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

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wallflower
While we're talking about <tag> origins:

[http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.html)

"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG"

-Marc Andreesen, 25 Feb 93

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

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

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tung
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>

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

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Luyt
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.

~~~
arethuza
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.

------
rbanffy
<blink>12:00</blink>

~~~
CWuestefeld
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.

~~~
roofone
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.

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jyothi
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.

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

~~~
joeyh
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_...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_for_blink.html)

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.)

------
cromulent
Previously:

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

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

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

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

