Monday, July 28, 2008

Blink Be Gone

Some random geeky thoughts today: The software I'm working on uses blinking, red text for "server error" messages. I had forgotten how annoying that was; blinking text on the web has gone away.

WAAAY back in HTML 1.0 days, there was a lot of use of the infamous <blink> tag. Blinking text on a web site was a sure sign that it was designed by somebody who didn't know what they were doing.

It's yet another nice example of market forces creating spontaneous order, and creating "good enough" solutions. Firefox still support blink, but you almost never see it any more. I'm just surprised no congress-critter jumped on the bandwagon and introduced legislation to ban it (for safety-- apparently, too much blinking text can cause seizures in certain sensitive people).

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