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. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife.
Invent <blink> and meet the wife in one day. I'm pretty sure this qualifies for evil genius...
They may do if they have multiple wives, right? In which case, from the perspective of the husband, it might not have been a bad night all around which was my (poorly made) point.
Your comment deserves a woosh, but this isn't reddit. The parent post was making fun of a spelling error by making similar errors in 'tag', 'Netscape' and 'Navigator'.
Your comment is also wrong in that marquee actually originated in Internet Explorer 3. I remember when there were webpages that would blink in Netscape and marquee in Internet Explorer since each browser had its own proprietary annoying tag.
People will say 'woosh' if somebody took a joking comment seriously because the humor was too sophisticated. People use this word because it is the sound made when the comment goes over someone's head (here, the comment is treated like an airplane.)
Also, since I can no longer edit my earlier comment, it was actually derleth's comment that I was factually correcting (although he likely said that because it allowed the joke to work better).
Interesting that the blink tag never made it into Lynx since it should have been relatively trivial given that there is an ANSI escape sequence for it. I have fond memories of dialing up a BBS with dramatic blinking warnings and ANSI style art that had elaborate blinking designs.
The guy who went and implemented is a true hacker. He deserves applause. Everyone has those conversations where people say wouldn't this be funny. That guy did it and will forever live in the annuals of HTML. I should unleash a practical joke of my own...
Lou Montulli says in a Slashdot comment[1] that the tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?" (Now who is Marca? I'm guessing Marc Andreesen? I assume he intended this to be clear from context but I'm not familiar with these people.)
I didn't know about the hype tag, but for a really long time, at least on the Unix Navigator, you could type "about:hype" into the location bar and it would play marca's audio.
Oh, well. The important thing is that humankind has evolved since then: Never embed an animation effect in our markup.Today's web designer understands separation of content, presentation, and behavior. To 'blink', create a jQuery plug-in
A second and just-as-important lesson: never use blinking animation by itself. For maximum aesthetic appeal, use blink in precise syncronicity with the other core web site building blocks--pulsate, throb, flicker, and strobe.
I have to say, I find the blink tag to be quaint form of vulgar web design. I'm rather disappointed that it isn't supported by webkit. At least animated gifs still work http://www.lingscars.com/
This was also a great way to stop GIF animations from looping. A quick mangling of the string it looked for to find the extensions would let them play through once but not repeat.
Invent <blink> and meet the wife in one day. I'm pretty sure this qualifies for evil genius...