Gecko May Drop the Blink Tag

AmiMoJo writes "It looks like Mozilla are finally going to remove the much hated blink tag from the Gecko rendering engine that powers Firefox. Work to remove support for the tag, which was always non-standard and is not supported by the most popular HTML layout engines WebKit and Blink (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Android), is progressing and should show up in a future version of the browser." A comment attached to the discussion of this (not completed) move points out the odd possibility that Google's new Blink rendering engine may feature the blink tag via CSS animation, which would be "hilarious/awesome."

Comments

no problem

[iggymanz]

HTML5 allows blink functionality to be done via CSS3 animations, so they can never take the away from us!

Re:no problem

[AvitarX]

But It's appropriate for it to be in CSS, It's a style of display that has to syntax. I wish they'd remove bold and italic too.

Re:no problem

[hackula]

And last I checked a few months ago (don't ask), IE still allows the 'marquee' tag, which might be even "better" than 'blink'. (In case anyone does not remember it, 'marquee' is the one that scrolls all child DOM elements across the screen horizontally like a carnival ride.)

Re:no problem

[Carewolf]

And last I checked a few months ago (don't ask), IE still allows the 'marquee' tag, which might be even "better" than 'blink'. (In case anyone does not remember it, 'marquee' is the one that scrolls all child DOM elements across the screen horizontally like a carnival ride.)

Marquee is also supported by WebKit and Blink.

How is Blink the most popular?

[thestudio_bob]

How is Blink one of the most popular HTML layout engines?

Is being used yet?

Re:How is Blink the most popular?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will auto update every user.

Re:How is Blink the most popular?

[guttentag]

How is Blink one of the most popular HTML layout engines?

I think what they meant is that people who have no concept of HTML layout have a tendency to overcompensate for this shortcoming by using the BLINK tag as a replacement for all other more-subtle and more-refined embellishments (B, I, U, P, BR, etc.), and they use it with such gusto that use of the tag indicates a subscription to the Blink "School" of layout theory ("more blink equals more better" and so forth) which is treated as a layout engine unto itself, however crude it may be. Many adherents of the Blink School evolved to the Flash school during the AOLic period, but as Blink is so much simpler to implement, it serves as a common denominator and suggests that these simplest developers outnumber all other developers combined. This makes their "layout engine" the most popular, in much the same way that people who do not know how to drive set the popular rules of the road through their ignorance of the actual rules simply by outnumbering everyone else.

I feel there has been a great disturbance in the Blink School, as though millions of dancing animated hamsters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly stationary but not silenced.

Re:How is Blink the most popular?

[HaZardman27]

Sorry, that should be over 30 million people (Google claims over 300 million people are using Chrome).

Blink doesn't support blink?

[Chris Mattern]

How ironic.

Re:Blink doesn't support blink?

[tepples]

And Chrome had less chrome (window decorations, controls, and everything else other than the page content) than other browsers had when it came out. Only after Chrome came out did other major browser publishers think to hide the menu bar and overlap the title bar with tabs by default. Is Google trying to shoot for an irony streak?

Schrödinger is not amused

[TWX]

How are we supposed to now write Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment in only one line now?

Use CSS

[DERoss]

Since CSS 1 and still in CSS 2.1, blink has been a recognized value of the text-decoration property. For accessibility, browsers should blink slowly so as not to trigger epilepsy events in susceptible individuals.

Re:Use CSS

[Anonymous Coward]

This. How can people not know this has existed since forever as a CSS property?
It is madness I tell you.

No wonder the web tech is sitting in the 1500s, nobody knows what the hell the features are.

Might as well post this and destroy the sites speed further, a very useful thing in CSS that gets rid of the need for ID Abuse.
http://css-tricks.com/how-nth-child-works/
Actually, I won't link it since the site is slow as hell already, only the worthy will copy and paste or bother to right click and go.
Good luck, Arthur.
Actually this site loads quickly and is more detailed
Nth Child expressions
Most useful thing in CSS for selection.

I wonder what other features people don't know about.
So many new and older things that get obscured by "hey check this new useless feature out, DRM for HTML5" and other fun stuff.

Re:Use CSS

[Zontar The Mindless]

I knew about this when I was still building websites and that was something like... ten years ago. Jesus.

Re:Use CSS

[Lumpy]

Mostly because it has became as big of a mess as Perl Regular Expressions. HTML is well on it's way to becoming line noise.

Re:Use CSS

[Will.Woodhull]

Those of us who have done web tech since the 1990s know full well that knowing the CSS properties has had damn little value.

Until fairly recently, what had value was knowing which of the CSS standards actually worked in the real world. Which meant keeping an eye on the blighted Microsoft browser versions, and waiting until the ones that were not standards compliant dropped below the level of significance for a web site's intended audience.

For the most part, now we can all use the standard CSS and those web developers who know their subject and have enough experience behind them to do a good job of it are doing so. There is still the matter of sorting out best practices: the standards provide a nice toolkit, but cannot provide any real world guidance in when to use the screwdriver when the hammer is the better choice. The community of web developers is working through that now.

Good standards have been Out There for a long time, but it is only recently that the browsers that held the Web captive to their non-standard crappy ways have lost their dominant influence. I am looking at you, Microsoft. You have held back the world in pursuit of your own profits since the 1990s, but no more. Firefox's success fixed that; now even Microsoft is forced to recognize that to be competitive today, you have to be playing by the same rules as everyone else. Otherwise, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are going to eat your lunch.

Re:Use CSS

[Carewolf]

It is an optional part of CSS, and not supported by WebKit or Blink.

Geocities

[symes]

In the blink of an eye all that old Geocities goodness will be wiped away from the eyes of the unsuspecting.

Re:Geocities

[plover]

In the blink of an eye all that old Geocities goodness will be wiped away from the eyes of the unsuspecting.

How? They're not adding a <tasteful> tag.

Re:Geocities

[lgw]

Sadly, no, outside the wayback machine. There were some good reference sites there that were really fast (since no one else still used them).

So, "the end of days" ?

[fire4ever]

In older versions when typing "about:mozilla" we can read:

"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."

Re:So, "the end of days" ?

[kav2k]

Mod parent up! Actually true.

CSS already supports it.

[dackroyd]

Fiddle is here http://jsfiddle.net/Danack/3pFUS/

@-webkit-keyframes blink {
                from { opacity: 1.0; }
                to { opacity: 0.0; }
                0% { opacity: 1.0; }
                50% { opacity: 0.0; }
                100% { opacity: 1.0; }
        } .blink {
        -webkit-animation-name: blink;
        -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: steps(1);
        -webkit-animation-duration: 1s;
        }

Re:CSS already supports it.

[dackroyd]

Well this might - be really I'm not sure I _want_ this to work. http://jsfiddle.net/Danack/3pFUS/6/

Sample code for animating opacity

[tepples]

How are we supposed to now write Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment in only one line now?

Another user mentioned CSS3 animations, and there exists sample CSS3 code for animating opacity.

Re:It's a sad day...

[F. Lynx Pardinus]

It's a sad day for web developer all around the world.

I had to blink away the tears.

Isn't this going to break MySpace?

[tippe]

I suppose I should be happy they aren't removing support for rendering tasteless backgrounds and crappy fonts... My ugly MySpace page is safe. For now.

Re:no problem (Marquee)

[markzip]

Somewhere in the Wayback Machine there is a page I coded in 1997. It featured

marquee

nested inside

blink

. And I did it because the client's kid thought it was cool. I bet he's sorry to see it go, I know I am. ;-)

Re:no problem (Marquee)

[flimflammer]

Man, that brings me back... I remember back in the mid 90s putting small sprite animated gifs of running characters into marquee tags so it would look like one character was chasing the other in forum sigs...

I admit to using text-decoration: blink;

[Alain Williams]

In one web application a form has to be completed within 10 minutes. I have a bit of javascript that puts a message the top of the screen when there are 90 seconds to go, and then makes it blink when there are only 30 seconds left. I don't pretend that it is pretty, but it can bring the user back to a task that they got part way through before being distracted.

Just because something can be used to create monstrosities does not mean that it should be banned. If that were the case, then ban .jpg on the grounds of what used to be found at goatse.cx

Re:I admit to using text-decoration: blink;

[Maow]

In one web application a form has to be completed within 10 minutes. I have a bit of javascript that puts a message the top of the screen when there are 90 seconds to go, and then makes it blink when there are only 30 seconds left. I don't pretend that it is pretty, but it can bring the user back to a task that they got part way through before being distracted.

Just because something can be used to create monstrosities does not mean that it should be banned. If that were the case, then ban .jpg on the grounds of what used to be found at goatse.cx

I'll have to agree 100%. Yours seems like an entirely reasonable usage case for the blink tag. I would hope they'd keep it in the rendering engine and we can just leave pages that abuse the feature, as we do for so many other abused features.

I have a page that simulates a Bash terminal in which the client watches as commands are typed into a Bash terminal and the results are fetched via AJAX.

The cursor blinks slowly, just as it would in a real terminal.

It was a PITA to get characters "typed" slowly with some randomness since JS doesn't have a blocking sleep/wait function. I don't care to have to go in there and update the code.

Re:Article Typo

[CastrTroy]

I think it's a British English vs. American English thing. Since it's a corporation, it consists of a group of people, so they use the word "are" to account for that. In American English, it's proper grammar to say "The Miami Heat are going to win the championship this year". Because the Miami Heat is an organization of people. In the same sense, since Mozilla is an organization of people, the British use "are".

The Doctor is a Gecko developer now?

[gblues]

Don't .
<blink></blink> and you're dead.

(I am so, so sorry)

Re:Netscape Navigator Legacy?

[frisket]

It was first announced for Mosaic 2.5b2 and Netscape B09 in October 1994 (thread "HTML"). I criticised it for putting cuteness above all else, and Marc Andreesen justified it by claiming "professional" content providers wanted it, which I disputed, and then it got messy.