Lably
Skip to content

Blink element

Non-standard HTML element

  • 8 min read
  • 4 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Web browser, HTML and CSS

Lab · Class 10Web Builder

Despite its initial popularity among home users in the 1990s, it fell out of favor due to its overuse and the difficulty it presents in reading.

Origin

Lou Montulli, often credited as the inventor of the blink element, claims he only suggested the idea, without writing any actual code.

... At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. 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. ... Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

Sign in to keep reading

3 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Computing and communication

ISBNUnique numeric book identifier since 1970X (social network)American social networking serviceWayback MachineDigital archive by the Internet ArchivePython (programming language)General-purpose programming languageMacOSOperating system for Apple computersUnicodeCharacter encoding standard