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If, like me, you believe that the HTML “blink” tag is the devil’s work, Lifehacker has you covered: Disabling Blinking Text in Firefox. Takes about twenty seconds, including the time involved in reloading the afflicted page. Better yet, it works on all other pages henceforth.
-touches xeger, sending him back to Who-knows-when-
Ahh... You may have stopped my blink tag, but you meddling kids will never defeat my marquee tags. ha. ha. ha.
It's all my fault. For the record, Jim just made the phrase blink. I was the one who said that as long as he was making that joke, "arguably, the blinking text should be BF ital., in a fine bright red."
I want to make it clear that I understand and respect Patrick's opinions about "blink", and I almost always agree with them. The only exception I observe is for describing authors and their first books. And if I could figure out how to combine "blink" with "coruscating rainbow light", I'd do it -- purely for the sake of accurately conveying how brand-new authors think of their books.
Let me repeat: it's all my fault.
Being as there isn't an overwhelming number of blinky things on Making Light, and Mr. Macdonald is not normally one for doing annoying things just because, I'll leave the blinky thing on.
And I agree. First books deserve extra attention! Huzzah.
How very odd. My Safari is just showing the BF ital in a fine bright red--no blinking. I thought Patrick was just performing a public service out of the kindness of his heart.
My first webpage ever, which I wrote when I was 16, back in '96, had a BLINKING MARQUEE (these things scrolling horizontally). And yes, there were also animated gifs of candles. Haven't encountered a blink in the wild for the last decade or so.
I've removed the blink.
The joke wasn't worth annoying people.
Thank you for saving my eyes.Is there any similar option for the marquee tag?
Screw it. I put the blink back.
Yay for Jim's #10!
The thing about configurable tools is that everyone can have their preferences.
Animated gifs of candles (and other annoying visuals such as thumbs-up emoticons) can be mercilessly crushed with the Firefox Adblock Plus plugin; you just have to right-click on the offending image and allow the plugin to suppress it forever more.
As for the blink tag, just because someone I respect uses them, it doesn't make it not a sin.
That's wonderful. I just did it.
Jim, you could make it <font color=red>V</font><font color=orange>e</font><font color=yellow>r</font><font color=green>y </font><font color=blue>F</font><font color=purple>i</font><font color=red>r</font><font color=orange>s</font><font color=yellow>t </font><font color=green>B</font><font color=blue>o</font><font color=purple>o</font><font color=red>k</font>.
People still use blink? How barbaric.
Oh, you said you put the blink back while I was working on that one. Never mind.
It's a shame when you can't precisely remember something that happened on the internet once, but wasn't there some hilarious tag-assault on... I can't remember... dejanews when it first started? google when it tried highlighting/linking words in usenet posts? something like that? I just remember this tag-assault being conducted from rasff... oh, and I remember laughing my ass off at some of the results.
O.K. I've been saving this. Courtesy of the Internet Archive and the publicity department of Dreamworks SKG, here is the worst misuse of the blink tag in film promotion history. I can just hear the conference with the web designers when this assignment was handed out: "Only Notepad, and if you pick up a copy of Dreamweaver we're going to break all your fingers."
Michael @18, there was a period where I defined a custom header for my posts, along the lines of:
X-Get-A-Real-Newsreader: <FONT SIZE=7 COLOR="#FF0000"><BLINK>
...to discourage people from using Netscape Navigator as a Usenet client. It was pretty tough on AOL users, though.
If it's on now I don't see it, and I haven't run the Disable utility in Firefox 3.0.3.
Oh. It's in the previous post. Now I gotcha. The cold meds haven't kicked in yet.
Hah.
I almost forgot about blink tags.
One of the very first web pages I ever made was The Blink Sink.
I moved it from my CMU web space to my io.com web space when I graduated. When I dropped io.com I moved it here.
And it still works!
TexAnne, yeah, I'm using Safari too and it never blinked, not now, not when it was red. Neither does Stefan Jones's Blink Sink.
I suspect Apple has just unilaterally vetoed blink tags. I can't find a preference regarding the blink tag, so I'm pretty sure I didn't tell it to disable blink.
D'oh! Ignore that "sees spam." I knew that was going to happen. Didn't even catch it on preview.
TexAnne @ 2 -touches xeger, sending him back to Who-knows-when-
Argh!!! Bad Touch!!! ;) [0]
[0] Okay... I couldn't resist... I apologize!
Blink, and you're DEAD.
...what, everyone's beaten me to it? Crap.
#21 Avram:
Oh, yeah, that sounds right. Maybe the "triggering event" I was thinking of was people discovering all the nefarious uses of the X-Header dealie. I do recall having to knock it off because it was creating havoc for all the AOL users.
It was pretty funny while it lasted, though.
Boston users should disable blink as a matter of personal safety.
Forgive the bit of self-pimpery here, but as the longtime custodian of the (infamous in some circles) Page of the Damned, I feel I should chime in. Happy Halloween!
As an aside, I actually have found not one but two pages on the entire Internet that actually do use BLINK to good effect:
* The UNIX-Hater's Handbook
* "The Problem With Music" by Steve Albini (scroll to bottom)
That's it, I think.
You just have to be wired in a way of not blinking.
(What, there was no 'this is not a political thread' disclaimer!)
"The only proper use of the "blink" tag is to demonstrate why the "blink" tag should never be used."
I don't remember who said that, but it wasn't me-
Was this entry accidentally reposted from 1996? And then changed to Firefox from Netscape Navigator in order to cover it up?
What you would need for true atrocity is to be able to set an individual blink rate for each tag pair. If I was handier with Javascript I could probably make myself (even more) unpopular.
Michael @ #18, I remember that...it was a coordinated assault on Remarq. There was much merrymaking and tales of html boobytrapping. Reps from Remarq made it clear they didn't understand where they'd gone wrong. I don't know whatever happened to them (reps or company).
#29 ::: Nicole TWN #29: Blink, and you're DEAD.
Some opponents are so quick that you can only afford to blink one eye at a time during combat.
Bruce @ 19: here is the worst misuse of the blink tag in film promotion history. I can just hear the conference with the web designers when this assignment was handed out: "Only Notepad, and if you pick up a copy of Dreamweaver we're going to break all your fingers."
And also one of the most awesome uses of the blink tag ever. As a parody of the mid-90's Star Trek fan page it's as spot-on as the film itself was as a loving parody of Star Trek and its fans. It might not look good but it sure does look right.
Apropos of <blink>, from back in 1994 here's Top Ten HTML Extensions that Didn't Make it Into Netscape 0.9 (because they ran out of beer)
What/Who I think of when you say Blink.
Thanks a lot. Does anyone know wether there's an equally simple way to set Firefox' graphics mouseover so that it shows the entire picture comment (if there is one) and not just the first part with ellipses at the end? (Whose idea was it to put these ellipses there anyway? Aren't there any xkcd fans among the Firefox developers?)
The blink tag, like anything else, can be a useful tool (except when it isn't). But, times change. I saw blink and I thought Who not odd HTML tags.
Thank you.
Michael: I believe we drove Remarq out of business with our tags and poetry, which pretty much serves them right for trying to sell us. If this is true, it's a pretty terrific bit of guerilla theatre too, as well as a pretty cool example of ordinary people uniting to defeat exploitation through better understanding of tech -- as in Little Brother now I come to think of it.
It was very science fictional of us.
Raphael @ 44: The ellipses are due to a known bug in Firefox which was fixed with version 3. You need to either upgrade to 3 or use the Long Titles add-on if you're stuck with an earlier version.
Tania @ 42... Ah, the things I missed out on during the decade when I avoided everything related to the X-men...
Clarice was a child when Apocalypse took over Miami. Blink was discovered by Apocalypse's Horseman Mister Sinister and his right-hand, the Dark Beast (...) Blink was briefly transported into the Negative Zone, where she became romantically involved with the amnesic Annihilus, although he forced her to leave when he began to transform back into his original form.
From Miami to the Negative Zone?
#38 Arwen & #46 Jo::
Remarq! Yes, of course, that was it. Can't remember if Avram's guerilla tactics were part of that same episode, or what, but I suspect it was.
Ah, those were the days...
And here I thought my brain was on the blink.
The Galaxy Quest page seems to be an exercise in building a satirical reality, so I can only guess (and hope) that the blink tag is there for the same reason as the badly resized pictures, lack of anti-aliasing, etc -- to emulate some Star Trek fansites of the day.
You know, that was surprisingly easy.
You could stick a blink around it too, but that would be a bit superflous, wouldn't it (plus, it's irritating in a way that just having the shiny rotating colors isn't, quite).
Oh, FWIW, just extending the "objects" array and
the actual set of spans would work just fine. For
example, this.
No, BuffySquirrel is a known member of the community. Check the View All By.
Oops. Please accept my apology, BuffySquirrel.
#59 same link in poster name and post body.
Completely unrelated to the thread.
