[HN Gopher] <Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
Author : ghssds
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-06-08 04:17 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danq.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (danq.me)
| latchkey wrote:
| Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that
| enabled multiple <title> tags to effectively animate the window
| title? That was a fun one.
| 9rx wrote:
| In a similar vein, the little animated messages in the status
| bar was peak internet.
| satiric wrote:
| Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1],
| has anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in
| today's world of crazy CSS animations?
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Yeah, to _really_ emphasize an important message.
| seanhunter wrote:
| The correct use is alongside the "man with a spade".jpg to let
| people know your page is under construction.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!"
|
| https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an
| actors name when it's too long to fit under their profile pic.
| Seems like a good use.
| layer8 wrote:
| Music players, including car radios and portable CD and
| MiniDisc players, did that around 25 years ago. It's sort-of
| a standard UI pattern for variable-length text in a fixed-
| size display.
| bradly wrote:
| I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my
| homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even
| some multi-axis marquees for rain effect.
|
| [0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it
| renders properly in)
| edoceo wrote:
| Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
| mbo wrote:
| I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website
| (https://maxbo.me) as a allusion to news tickers (which are
| themselves an allusion to ticker tape machines:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| It's used _all over the place_ on Indian government websites,
| old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe
| sometimes by CSS.
|
| I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low
| frame rate. Maybe it's to make it more unpleasant so you won't
| want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead
| for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on
| a page.
| senfiaj wrote:
| Perhaps better semantics?
| sparkie wrote:
| They can be useful in a tabbed interface. Since the width of a
| tab is limited, and may not be large enough to fit in the text,
| scrolling the text in the active tab title may be better than
| hovering to show a tooltip (Though we should use the tooltip
| for the inactive tabs).
| yakattak wrote:
| I know it's horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test
| things in HTML sometimes.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I really need to repurpose 90s.dev asap.
|
| And not just to be another neocities.
|
| There's so much _lost joy and wonder_ to recover.
| dgfitz wrote:
| "Username checks out" - Reddit
|
| Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don't market it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Never got the hate to these.
|
| I think some people just want to feel important by diminishing
| things they see others diminishing, makes up from not having
| thoughts of one's own.
|
| This applies to everything, not just HTML obv.
| k1t wrote:
| People generally hate things that try to steal their attention
| away from the thing they are trying to focus on.
|
| It doesn't matter if it's a scrolling marquee, an animated gif,
| some Flash, a movie, a popup, a cookie banner, etc...
|
| Generally, moving/animated things grab your attention and
| people find it annoying.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| It's really simple, moving text is hard to read. As an example,
| turn on the local news (bear with me, I work for a TV station).
| You'll notice the scrolling ticker is likely simplified to
| focus on one headline at a time, with more pauses in between.
| moralestapia wrote:
| So, it's bad on web but good on TV?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| The opposite. It's been phased out of TV, (more pauses,
| less scrolling text) around the same timeframe that it
| phased out on the web. I threw together a visual
| comparison: https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b2741
| 4bbb93c3cc297...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Wow. Great comparison, thanks!
| xnx wrote:
| As others have said: scrolling text is harder to read than non-
| scrolling text. Scrolling text is useful in the real world when
| space is limited. On the web, there is no space limit, so
| almost no reason for scrolling text.
| moralestapia wrote:
| ???
|
| What do you mean by "on the web, there is no space limit"?
|
| If you're talking about the interface by which we consume the
| content, I use a screen whose dimensions are finite. What do
| you use?
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...
| ksymph wrote:
| HN hug of death?
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...
| divbzero wrote:
| Interestingly, the default <marquee> doesn't appear as smooth as
| a CSS animation would be?
|
| Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother:
| <marquee scrolldelay="50" truespeed>scroll faster than
| default</marquee>
| flowerbard wrote:
| They weren't smooth back then by default either.
| esprehn wrote:
| In Chromium it's quite literally a CSS animation:
| https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...
|
| All the code in that file is a fun read. <marquee> was
| rewritten as if it was a web component using the public DOM
| APIs (ex. It uses CSS animations and requestAnimationFrame).
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that originally it was to reduce CPU load, and
| later was left that way for backwards compatibility.
| donatj wrote:
| I was there, 3,000 years ago.
|
| I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was
| bad practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames?
|
| I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the
| server without reloading the page.
|
| I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the
| early 2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders
| of States on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have
| a clickable map.
|
| I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong
| and losing their changes on a template update and no way to get
| it back because no one used version control.
|
| I remember <input type=image> and handling where you clicked on
| an image in the backend.
|
| I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still
| works in Chrome, less reliably in Firefox.
|
| I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix
| just to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that
| worked somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and
| everything to become flat and us to not really need it anymore.
|
| I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and
| Silverlight.
|
| I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a
| godsend Firebug was.
|
| I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day.
|
| 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
| deadbabe wrote:
| 3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they
| should format Papyrus text.
| SvenL wrote:
| I think this is a reference to a LotR meme.
| https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared
| bornfreddy wrote:
| For those who prefer not to visit yt, the quote "I was
| there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago"
| refers to Elrond talking about the time when Isildur took
| the One Ring from Sauron.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I made a webchat with frames; an infinitely-loading top part
| for the text, and the bottom an input box that received 204 to
| not reload when you sent a message. I guess that was the most
| elegant way to do it in the IE4+ days. The top part could also
| receive a small <script> that would reload the frame on the
| right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a
| couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
| vanviegen wrote:
| I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab)
| working on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding
| <script> tags from JavaScript. The server would delay
| answering until there were new messages available, or some
| timeout. This was even before xmlhttprequest. Who needs
| websocket? :-)
| distances wrote:
| Sounds fancy! My solution back then was infinitely auto-
| updating a frame with a meta refresh tag. It would receive
| a new <script> block that would update the contents of
| other frames. This of course wouldn't give real-time
| functionality.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Fun, until you had dial up so slow the refresh happened
| again before anything on the page fully loaded (mostly an
| issue with images)
| troupo wrote:
| It's still a way (with a frame autorefresh) to make chats on
| Tor, since many users will have JS turned off
| perilunar wrote:
| Been there, have done (most of) this. Never used Silverlight,
| but did use VRML, Java Applets, and Chromeffects.
|
| I remember writing image maps by hand, getting the point
| coordinates directly from the image in Photoshop.
|
| Re version control: learned very early on to make a backup of a
| website before making any changes. Our version control was
| /site/yyyymmdd/
| atemerev wrote:
| Spacer gifs, OMG, the memories! <table> should be enough for
| everyone.
|
| What is the motion jpeg hack? I made my own streaming too
| before websocket... but I never heard of this.
| 42droids wrote:
| Started in 1998 with front page.
| xnx wrote:
| Fancy! Not even Front Page Express first?
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| Don't remind me, Front Page Express' generated HTML was the
| stuff of nightmares.
| xnx wrote:
| Still better than Microsoft Word.
| shawn_w wrote:
| >Who here remembers frames?
|
| I visit a site with frames several times a week. Nobody's ever
| told the Open Group/POSIX people they're not supposed to use
| them these days.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Plenty of modems/routers still use frames in their management
| interfaces.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I explained the concept of frames to a developer born after
| the millennium, and their reaction was that it is a pure
| magic.
| jameslk wrote:
| I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool
|
| To export gifs meant to be positioned perfectly in HTML tables
|
| For designs suited best for 800x600
|
| All those moments lost in time, like tears in the rain
| skerit wrote:
| > I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool
|
| I made so many newsletters using that tool back in 2009. I
| remember a new designer was appalled I used it, and did not
| write the HTML code manually... 70% of our receivers were
| using Outlook and the horrible Word-based HTML renderer. I'm
| not writing anything manual for that piece of crap.
| codingdave wrote:
| That is what Fireworks was great for:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
| reconnecting wrote:
| 2. <BGSOUND>
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| I remember a website about Ski-Doo snowmobiles that my friend
| was obsessed about (both the website and snowmobiles) in 1998
| or so. It was from Canada, and the bgsound was the website
| owner saying something in French.
|
| To us, it sounded like: fjanfny, hmmhmmhmm, dadadada. I only
| realized lately that the first word must be "bienvenue". It
| would be amazing to find it again on archive.org but
| unfortunately I dont remember more than this. :)
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I remember cgi.pm and the magic of communicating two ways.
| b800h wrote:
| I was expecting you to tell me that all of these moments will
| be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."
| mcswell wrote:
| b800h, meet jameslk (see post a few lines above yours)
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| I remember when display flex was still new, experimental, and
| not universally supported :)
| zambal wrote:
| Don't know if it was intentional, but your ramble reminded me
| of the lyrics of Losing my edge by LCD Soundsystem. However, as
| someone who also experienced most of this stuff, it was a fun
| read either way :)
| Timwi wrote:
| I developed web software with frames and I thought it was
| perfectly fine. To this day I still don't understand the issue
| with frames. People sometimes mention accessibility for screen
| readers, but nothing more specific than that, so I still don't
| know what the actual problem is.
| xnx wrote:
| All content on the web should have a unique, linkable, URL.
| Frameset breaks that.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| That doesn't stop today's dynamically updating pages that
| also break the back button.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Frames also broke the back button when they were first
| introduced!
|
| Together with the other early problems - ugly borders,
| proliferation of scrollbars, and limited browser
| compatibility - it meant that frames were seen as a
| usability disaster right from the start.
|
| They never managed to fully shake that reputation even as
| browsers improved in the later 90s.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| That ship has long since sailed. We live in a world of web
| apps with dynamically created content, AJAX, and so on. The
| main entry point for the app has a URL, and then within the
| app all bets are off. Same with framesets.
| xnx wrote:
| SPAs were a low point, but I've found consistent and
| linkable URLs has gotten better with developers
| recognizing the importance due to "SEO".
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Also crawlers can now evaluate SPAs. Googles crawlers
| will run JavaScript on the page making the SPA SEO issue
| much less of an issue now.
|
| Idk if that counts as a low point or a high point.
| no_wizard wrote:
| There se excretes to this, particularly if you value
| speedy vs delayed updates to your indexing
| atesti wrote:
| If you right click a link and open in new window (or middle
| click), the frameset was gone and only the piece in the frame
| was visible. Also you could not bookmark anything. I remember
| doing a frameset per content frame url automatically and also
| redirecting to that frameset from inside the page via
| javascript if the content frame's url was directly opened.
| torgoguys wrote:
| Framesets were great.
|
| >If you right click a link and open in new window (or
| middle click), the frameset was gone and only the piece in
| the frame was visible.
|
| Feature, not bug in my book. Same thing happens in today's
| iframes. But for situations where that is a problem, the
| spec could have been extended to support every page being
| able to identify a preferred parent frame. Or browsers
| could have changed behavior to by default duplicate a
| frame's parent and siblings when opening a frame in a new
| window.
|
| >Also you could not bookmark anything.
|
| Again a limitation of the spec that could have been
| addressed rather than throwing out a useful feature. We
| support have text fragment identifiers in URLs these days;
| surely we could have supported URLs with multipart frame
| targets.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| If browsers got around to actually implementing basic
| features on browser level like making a frame navigation
| work instead of coming up with new CSS properties that
| nobody is going to use we could be all building websites
| without any javascript.
| echelon wrote:
| We should have frozen the web from 2006 - 2010 or so.
|
| We had Ajax, lots of modern CSS, but weren't hell-bent on
| CSSifying and "SPA"-ing everything. Web standards hadn't yet
| jumped the shark.
|
| It's also before Steve Jobs murdered Flash.
|
| Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made. The
| modern HTML/CSS/JS stack can't replicate how simple and
| functional it was. We're easily dealing with 100x the
| complexity now.
|
| We let Google trick us into going down this path. And now
| they're going to kill the web to keep us on their LLMs and
| platforms.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I agree. Personally I think we'd be better off without
| social media sites or smart phones
| mcswell wrote:
| Punch cards. We need to go back to punch cards.
| cebert wrote:
| Why would we want to do that? The data density is quite
| low.
| okanat wrote:
| Flash was a bigger privacy hole than HTML5 canvas. I think
| we need to mandate browsers that block those APIs on
| default and only enable them via permission. <canvas> is
| often used in fingerprinting. So blocking its introspection
| APIs would already benefit us.
| echelon wrote:
| That sounds like a big deal until you realize that
| nothing was private back then.
|
| Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't
| enforced until 2018!
|
| No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site
| protection (first standardized in 2012).
|
| Everything was the Wild West.
|
| Flash was fine and could have adopted the same
| mechanisms.
|
| If Adobe (or the earlier owners) had open sourced the
| player and the format standard, they could have won and
| had the best authoring tool for the format.
|
| To this day, Flash is the only downloadable binary bundle
| format that can still run on your PC after being
| downloaded. You can't download and SVG animation. It's a
| bundle of brittle web tech slop.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site
| protection (first standardized in 2012).
|
| This is not correct. CORS doesn't protect anything, it
| _removes_ security barriers. The same-origin policy that
| stops cross-site requests goes back to the 90s, it's been
| in there about as long as JavaScript.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Flash was basically a remote shell with some animation
| tools on top. The Windows malware hell of the early
| 2000s, with random websites (even a banner ad on the New
| York Times once) doing drive-by-installs of early
| ransomware. (Thankfully, cryptolocker ones hadn't started
| yet...) And if you were a Windows escapee, the Flash
| experience was absolute trash on OS X and Linux.
|
| It also became clear that the source code was borderline
| unmaintainable and/or Adobe lost everyone who knew or
| cared about it after they bought Macromedia.
| cardanome wrote:
| Oh man, the good old times when you could get a job just
| knowing a bit of HTML, CSS and JS. I so wish I could go
| back.
|
| Now I am micromanaging a LLM that gets to do the fun parts.
| I have become the middle management I always hated.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Adobe killed Flash by letting it die. It had plenty of
| issues, none of them unfixable. Adobe didn't fix these
| issues (security, accessibility,...) all while keeping
| everything proprietary. It was unsustainable and
| unfortunately, Flash had to go.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| > I still don't understand the issue with frames.
|
| I paid for 1024x768. Because of your frames, the content I'm
| actually interested in is now restricted to some disgusting
| and dismaying fraction of that. The borders of my bitchin'
| 15" CRT are now committed to navigation (which I have to
| scroll horizontally to actually make sense of) and what is
| likely a LinkExchange banner on the bottom that adds
| absolutely nothing to my experience.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It generally got a bad reputation because it was abused to
| keep people on portal-like and aggregator sites. These sites
| would parasitically add navigation banners and ads(!) to
| content they didn't own. You had to be somewhat web-savvy to
| know how to escape an annoying frame.
|
| They also wouldn't fly these days because of CSP and general
| web security.
|
| When Google Image Search first launched, it surprised people
| because they found a legitimate use for frames that wasn't
| user-hostile.
| sedatk wrote:
| > so I still don't know what the actual problem is.
|
| 1. Not adaptable to the variety of display form factors we
| have today. In other words, not responsive enough.
|
| 2. As others mentioned, not being able to link a specific
| page. Maybe it can be overcome with modern browser history
| replacement API's nowadays.
|
| 3. A link to one of the frames not opening with necessary
| navigation elements. That used to be solved by redirecting
| the user to another page that would decorate the same page
| with the frames around it. Quite cumbersome.
|
| 4. Since all frame components are individual web pages, the
| communication between them isn't straightforward except for
| opening a link in another frame. Programming more complicated
| logic (such as dragging from one to another, or sharing
| components in other ways) would be quite difficult.
|
| 5. Every frame has its own scrollbar. It's less accessible,
| and looks terrible too.
|
| 6. Analytics is harder to track.
| brazzy wrote:
| My personal website uses an image map for its main navigation
| menu. It still works just fine.
| ceautery wrote:
| You're in good company, Paul Graham's site does as well.
|
| https://paulgraham.com/index.html
| rdrd wrote:
| I remember working for a client who needed to support IE6 (with
| all the insane bugs/quirks/limitations) and I'd despair every
| time the designers would hand over a Photoshop design with
| rounded corners. They also needed it to be responsive (at the
| time mostly just different desktop sizes). Would usually
| require cutting the corners out and positioning them in table
| cells. There's a certain amount of dev resilience you build
| having to do stuff like that by hand!
| layer8 wrote:
| At least table rows didn't unexpectedly wrap to a new line
| like float-based layouts.
| rdrd wrote:
| Even though it was a long time ago I still have IE6/7
| workarounds burned into my brain, most of them float
| related but also having a whole stylesheet for that damn
| browser... <!--[if lte IE 6]>:
|
| https://code.google.com/archive/p/universal-ie6-css/
| emfrosztovis wrote:
| I'm only 20 but when I immediately recognized this I felt
| so old.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| For some reason I actually really loved doing this. I
| remembering feeling disappointed when css got border radius.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or just telling the designers "we can't do rounded corners
| for this client" (the client likely didn't care at all).
| mrweasel wrote:
| We worked with an internal design team, but basically just
| one UX specialist who has zero comprehension of how HTML, CSS
| or and web related technologies worked. At one point we where
| meet with "I don't like that the site blinks!" ... What do
| you mean by "blinks", we built it, it doesn't blink. Turns
| out she didn't like that that switching pages would cause the
| browser to load the next page and in turn there would be an
| ever so brief moment where the browser would show a blank
| page while loading the next page. This was in the initial
| ASP.NET and Ajax days, to the end result was "wrap the whole
| damn thing in an update panel".
|
| For those who doesn't know the ASP.NET update panel was
| basically HTMX before HTMX. The browser would do a background
| request and replace the content of the update panel with the
| html returned by the background request. Normally you'd just
| use if for a form submit, e.g. like a comment box. The user
| puts in their comment, the backend return all the comments,
| including the new one and the browser replace the current
| list of comments with the new one. We essentially put the
| entire site in to the update panel.
| connorgurney wrote:
| Oh, man, this takes me right back. Scary how time gets away
| from you.
| crabique wrote:
| I remember WML <card> tag, essentially SPA 20 years before SPA
| even became a term.
| cardamomo wrote:
| I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
| fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in
| the dark near the Tannhauser Gates. All those moments will be
| lost in time, like <blink> and <marquee>.
| TapamN wrote:
| My favorite trick with <marquee> was to nest them, with
| different, alternating directions. You could make the contents
| alternate between scrolling and stopping by setting the inner
| marquee to travel in the opposite direction at the same speed as
| the outer marquee. Or do more levels with alternating speeds to
| make it zip around randomly. I think you had to set a max width
| for the inner marquees for this to work?
| flomo wrote:
| "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 (about:mozilla)
|
| And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
| atemerev wrote:
| I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
| shawn_w wrote:
| I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now
| that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
| trallnag wrote:
| It still supports stripped down as blockers. For the casual
| user something like ublock lite is probably perfectly fine
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| if you switch between chrome and FF (say work/home) the
| difference are glarring though...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Currently you can still reactivate the ad blocker
| extensions, it's a bit hidden behind a three dot menu and
| you have to confirm a scary warning but it's still possible
| to run u lock origin at the moment. They might disable the
| workaround later though.
| flomo wrote:
| Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's
| what Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I assume you were being sarcastic? I see it the other way
| around - the sooner Mozilla gets off the drugs^WGoogle's
| money the better the chance we get a proper competitor to
| Chrome.
| cubefox wrote:
| The opposite will happen as they lose most of their
| funding. They will have to fire most developers and
| switch to chromium, to become yet another Chrome reskin.
| Congratulations, you killed Firefox.
| ripdog wrote:
| Um, so, how are Mozilla supposed to get the hundreds of
| millions of dollars a year it costs to pay engineers to
| maintain an evergreen browser without Google's funding?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| How did they survive without their funding before they
| got it? And don't say that web standards are much more
| complex nowadays - yes, they are, because it is in
| Google's interest to make them such. Will it hurt? Yes.
| Will Firefox survive? I hope so. Is it a bad idea? No.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > How did they survive without their funding before they
| got it?
|
| They were initially Netscape, a commercial company, so
| they had money from their customers.
|
| After the browser code base was handed over from
| Netscape/AOL to the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, they got
| donations from AOL, IBM, Red Hat, etc. which kept them
| going for a few more years.
|
| The Mozilla Foundation signed the deal with Google two
| years later, in 2005.
|
| In short, they survived first on commercial revenues and
| then from donations, neither of which are substantial
| now.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Same here, but this is in spite is the governance of the
| foundation looking so out of rails and simultaneously lake of
| better alternative I'm aware of with both better governance
| and fine enough technological state.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| The good old days of writing html on the windows 98 notepad.
|
| No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure,
| healthy, free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.
| timpark wrote:
| The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as
| an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using
| (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to
| "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Yeah, but if someone had used <blonk> you would get... blonking
| I guess? :) Nice hack!
| timpark wrote:
| Exactly, haha! :) Thanks!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I do this kind of thing with the Slack client (a silver lining
| of Electron apps: it's dead simple) so that I can kill features
| I don't like, such as hiding notifications or stopping the
| signal that I'm writing a message.
| username223 wrote:
| Binary editing was/is good fun. I remember replacing
| "__gnu_warning" with "__gnu_whining" to quiet some dumb
| nannying around gets(). Yeah, sure, buffer overruns, but if I'm
| writing some throwaway program, I can just not overrun the
| buffer.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website
| made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold,
| Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the
| lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer
| period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to
| shift the message back into the viewport.
|
| What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and
| computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would
| blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
| geoffbp wrote:
| Image of a construction worker digging
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Yes. And it should be animated as the background image so you
| can't read any of the normal text in 6 px font without
| highlighting it.
| geoffmunn wrote:
| also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email'
| rotating around a globe.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| This comment is under construction - check back here often to see
| updates!
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Where are your visit counter and guestbook?
| brazzy wrote:
| Right under the web ring.
| layer8 wrote:
| Don't forget the [NEW]
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| For which browser is this page optimized?
| ryanthedev wrote:
| This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was
| created as a joke.
| adamcik wrote:
| A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` around his middle
| name as a quick and dirty way to test for missing escaping and
| possible xss. Back in the day this was surprisingly effective at
| uncovering problems :-)
| ajdude wrote:
| I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are
| shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the
| animations are done via marquee tags: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
| al_borland wrote:
| I probably haven't looked at the marquee tag in 20 years, so I
| could have just forgotten, but I was unaware it has a direction
| parameter to allow for vertical scrolling.
| HnUser12 wrote:
| Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags.
|
| https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php
| chgs wrote:
| I just applied for an evisa for India. It was horrendous. Pages
| wouldn't continue without telling you what was wrong (too many
| or not enough commas in the address/phone field was one). When
| returning to the form the pre filled data had quotes in, which
| then wasn't valid. Missing labels on fields. Then the hilarious
| "what countries in the last ten years, list all or get
| deported" combined with "you have too many countries". They
| only allow 20.
|
| I don't know if it's the state of development in the country as
| a whole or just the lowest bidder for a government service
| problem.
| HnUser12 wrote:
| All of that is true. However, to be fair, these are older
| sites. The newer ones are generally cleaner and usable[1].
| Even the services provided is much more streamlined.
|
| https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/
| al_borland wrote:
| This was to prepare you for navigating once there. I still
| have flashbacks to the Delhi Airport. Every time I turned a
| corner there was someone there asking to see the name on my
| itinerary (a random sheet of paper I printed out hat I didn't
| think I'd actually need) with my passport and ticket. It
| happened so many times I almost missed my layover.
| GranPC wrote:
| Holy crap, that's a website alright
| jameslk wrote:
| They took away the <blink> tag from us, due to what can only be
| explained as the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in
| modern browsers, and late stage capitalism.
|
| However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source
| community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill:
| https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection.
|
| I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities
| because marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody
| intentionally uses, making it easy to identify when an attack
| works.
|
| I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects
| of HTML injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it
| really shouldn't move" is something people understand better than
| "this text is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."
| precommunicator wrote:
| When doing HTML sanitization, I always whitelist marquee as an
| easter egg (and almost nothing else)
| rda2 wrote:
| I browse Hacker News through a custom aggregator. This post is
| how I found out it's susceptible to HTML injection - a (2020)
| was marqueeing across my screen.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0].
|
| My _magnum opus_ was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black
| page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you
| moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room
| interface.
|
| You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then,
| you needed Flash.
|
| The space must flow...
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
| Theodores wrote:
| One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused.
|
| However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For
| someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to
| use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the
| HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually
| learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page.
|
| It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much
| like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid
| people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great
| utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.
| K0IN wrote:
| in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is
| one of the worst things you can do to your users, please don't
| use this" which they sadly removed.
|
| here is the German version:
| https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425
| dmatech wrote:
| The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on
| JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still
| there for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape
| the argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| arp242 wrote:
| Removing it will cause old code to throw an exception. By
| making it a no-op the code will remain working. There's tons of
| old unmaintained stuff on the web.
| jabo wrote:
| The day I discovered that marquee tags have a direction
| attribute, using which you can make the text go up/down
| left/right and use multiple of these tags, is still etched in my
| memory.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| A coworker of mine unironically added a marquee tag to an
| internal tool we were working on. Not as a joke, he just googled
| how to add scrolling text and copy pasted it, without knowing the
| history behind it
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| without the marquee tag how were we supposed to build the
| scrolling LCD screens that dominated our physical electronics?
| mcswell wrote:
| I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/
| UAPs that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line
| up a bunch of drones that can communicate with each other via
| directional (or just weak) radio or laser transmissions. Then
| when a drone on one end of the line receives a radar pulse from
| an aircraft (etc.), it sends back a stronger pulse than its
| reflection would be, and simultaneously signals the next drone in
| line. That drone sends off a radar pulse and signals the next
| drone in line, etc. The effect, as viewed from the aircraft with
| the radar, would be a somewhat larger (or more reflective) target
| moving rapidly. The line of drones would not need to be straight,
| in which case it could simulate a fast-moving object that
| suddenly turns.
| atum47 wrote:
| You can put a marquee inside a marquee and make the DVD bouncing
| logo.
|
| Did that on my first day of college, inside an .hta file for
| windows and blew my classmates minds. #hackerman
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Ahh, good times. I ran a "college dorm floor" website off my
| computer for a while and included a 997-word marquee on it, just
| rambling and talking about girls, depression, and philosophy. At
| the very end there was an exclamation point that was a href to a
| hidden page. Of course, someone hit view source to read the
| stupidly long message and found the page anyway.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Controversial take: marquee is still useful, and I still use it!
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think <marquee> is even worse than <blink> (even if you do not
| use CSS).
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