https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ Skip to content * Blog + Articles + Everything + Notes + Reposts (shares) + Checkins (geo*) + Videos + Reviews + Comics + Tags + Stats + Subscribe + Blogroll * About + Polyamory + Volunteering + Colophon + A Eulogy for Peter George Huntley * Contact + Contact Form + Instant Messengers + GPG Key * Projects + Free Deed Poll + KeePass for Opera + mOTP for Ruby + PicInHTML + Rails SSL Auth + Dozens of other projects... and I was chatting with a fellow web developer recently and made a joke about the HTML and tags, only to discover that he had no idea what I was talking about. They're a part of web history that's fallen off the radar and younger developers are unlikely to have ever come across them. But for a little while, back in the 90s, they were a big deal. Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 code editor window showing a

heading wrapped in and tags, for emphasis. Even Macromedia Dreamweaver, which embodied the essence of 1990s web design, seemed to treat wrapping in as an antipattern. Invention of the element is often credited to Lou Montulli, who wrote pioneering web browser Lynx before being joining Netscape in 1994. He insists that he didn't write any of the code that eventually became the first implementation of . Instead, he claims: while out at a bar (on the evening he'd first meet his wife!), he pointed out that many of the fancy new stylistic elements the other Netscape engineers were proposing wouldn't work in Lynx, which is a text-only browser. The fanciest conceivable effect that would work across both browsers would be making the text flash on and off, he joked. Then another engineer - who he doesn't identify - pulled a late night hack session and added it. And so it was that when Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released in 1995 it added support for the tag. Also animated GIFs and the first inklings of JavaScript, which collectively would go on to define the "personal website" experience for years to come. Here's how you'd use it: This is my blinking text! With no attributes, it was clear from the outset that this tag was supposed to be a joke. By the time HTML4 was published as a a recommendation two years later, it was documented as being a joke. But the Web of the late 1990s saw it used a lot. If you wanted somebody to notice the "latest updates" section on your personal home page, you'd wrap a tag around the title (or, if you were a sadist, the entire block). Cameron's World website, screenshot, showing GIFS and bright pallette If you missed this particular chapter of the Web's history, you can simulate it at Cameron's World. In the same year as Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0. At this point, Internet Explorer was still very-much playing catch-up with the features the Netscape team had implemented, but clearly some senior Microsoft engineer took a look at the tag, refused to play along with the joke, but had an innovation of their own: the tag! It had a whole suite of attributes to control the scroll direction, speed, and whether it looped or bounced backwards and forwards. While encouraged disgusting and inaccessible design as a joke, did it on purpose. Oh my god this still works in most modern browsers! Oh my god this still works in most modern browsers! If you see the text above moving... you're looking at a living fossil in browser history. But here's the interesting bit: for a while in the late 1990s, it became a somewhat common practice to wrap content that you wanted to emphasise with animation in both a and a tag. That way, the Netscape users would see it flash, the IE users would see it scroll or bounce. Like this: This is my really important message! Internet Explorer 5 showing a marquee effect. Wrap a inside a and IE users will see the marquee. Delightful. The web has always been built on Postel's Law: a web browser should assume that it won't understand everything it reads, but it should provide a best-effort rendering for the benefit of its user anyway. Ever wondered why the modern