A RetroSearch Logo

Home - News ( United States | United Kingdom | Italy | Germany ) - Football scores

Search Query:

Showing content from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_element below:

blink element (<blink> tag) - MDN Web Docs Glossary: Definitions of Web-related terms

blink element (<blink> tag)

The <blink> element (blink tag) is an obsolete HTML feature no longer supported by web browsers and no longer documented on MDN. It was used to make text content blink on and off (flash) continually.

The <blink> element was used like this:

<blink>In ancient browsers, I may have blinked</blink>
Brief history

In the early days of the web (the early- to mid-90s), there were not many features available for styling web pages. The CSS specification (version 1) was first released in 1996 and not adopted consistently by browsers until much later. Before CSS, browsers experimented with several features to make particular text sections stand out and grab the user's attention. The <blink> element was one of these, introduced in early versions of Netscape Navigator; Internet Explorer's <marquee> element was another.

The <blink> element was apparently created after a conversation in a bar in Mountain View between Netscape engineer Lou Montulli and colleagues. When he went into the office the next morning, he found that one of his fellow engineers had stayed up all night and implemented it (read the story here).

While initially popular, <blink> became much maligned because of overuse; many people found it annoying. More importantly, it degrades readability and can be particularly problematic for users with visual impairments or cognitive disorders such as epilepsy or ADHD. It can be disorienting or, in the worst cases, even trigger seizures.

<blink> was never properly specified and never achieved significant cross-browser support. It can be considered a piece of web history.

Alternatives See also

RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue

Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo

HTML: 3.2 | Encoding: UTF-8 | Version: 0.7.3