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<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)

https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/
76•ghssds•3h ago

Comments

latchkey•3h ago
Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that enabled multiple <title> tags to effectively animate the window title? That was a fun one.
satiric•3h ago
Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1], has anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in today's world of crazy CSS animations?

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

90s_dev•3h ago
Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
seanhunter•2h ago
The correct use is alongside the “man with a spade”.jpg to let people know your page is under construction.
bitwize•2h ago
"Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!"

https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction

8n4vidtmkvmk•2h ago
Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an actors name when it's too long to fit under their profile pic. Seems like a good use.
bradly•2h ago
I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some multi-axis marquees for rain effect.

[0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)

edoceo•2h ago
Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
mbo•2h ago
I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website (https://maxbo.me) as a allusion to news tickers (which are themselves an allusion to ticker tape machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape)
chrismorgan•13m ago
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS.

I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low frame rate. Maybe it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.

yakattak•3h ago
I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.
bryanrasmussen•3h ago
needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.
90s_dev•3h ago
I really need to repurpose 90s.dev asap.

And not just to be another neocities.

There's so much lost joy and wonder to recover.

dgfitz•2h ago
“Username checks out” - Reddit

Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.

moralestapia•3h ago
Never got the hate to these.

I think some people just want to feel important by diminishing things they see others diminishing, makes up from not having thoughts of one's own.

This applies to everything, not just HTML obv.

k1t•1h ago
People generally hate things that try to steal their attention away from the thing they are trying to focus on.

It doesn't matter if it's a scrolling marquee, an animated gif, some Flash, a movie, a popup, a cookie banner, etc...

Generally, moving/animated things grab your attention and people find it annoying.

neonate•2h ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...
ksymph•2h ago
HN hug of death?

https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...

divbzero•2h ago
Interestingly, the default <marquee> doesn’t appear as smooth as a CSS animation would be?

Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother:

  <marquee scrolldelay="50" truespeed>scroll faster than default</marquee>
flowerbard•2h ago
They weren’t smooth back then by default either.
donatj•1h ago
I was there, 3,000 years ago.

I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was bad practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames?

I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the server without reloading the page.

I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the early 2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders of States on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have a clickable map.

I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong and losing their changes on a template update and no way to get it back because no one used version control.

I remember <input type=image> and handling where you clicked on an image in the backend.

I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still works in Chrome, less reliably in Firefox.

I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix just to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that worked somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and everything to become flat and us to not really need it anymore.

I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and Silverlight.

I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a godsend Firebug was.

I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day.

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

deadbabe•1h ago
3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they should format Papyrus text.
SvenL•14m ago
I think this is a reference to a LotR meme. https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared
iforgotpassword•1h ago
I made a webchat with frames; an infinitely-loading top part for the text, and the bottom an input box that received 204 to not reload when you sent a message. I guess that was the most elegant way to do it in the IE4+ days. The top part could also receive a small <script> that would reload the frame on the right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
vanviegen•33m ago
I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab) working on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding <script> tags from JavaScript. The server would delay answering until there were new messages available, or some timeout. This was even before xmlhttprequest. Who needs websocket? :-)
distances•14m ago
Sounds fancy! My solution back then was infinitely auto-updating a frame with a meta refresh tag. It would receive a new <script> block that would update the contents of other frames. This of course wouldn't give real-time functionality.
perilunar•1h ago
Been there, have done (most of) this. Never used Silverlight, but did use VRML, Java Applets, and Chromeffects.

I remember writing image maps by hand, getting the point coordinates directly from the image in Photoshop.

Re version control: learned very early on to make a backup of a website before making any changes. Our version control was /site/yyyymmdd/

atemerev•59m ago
Spacer gifs, OMG, the memories! <table> should be enough for everyone.

What is the motion jpeg hack? I made my own streaming too before websocket... but I never heard of this.

42droids•42m ago
Started in 1998 with front page.
shawn_w•34m ago
>Who here remembers frames?

I visit a site with frames several times a week. Nobody's ever told the Open Group/POSIX people they're not supposed to use them these days.

chrismorgan•20m ago
Plenty of modems/routers still use frames in their management interfaces.
TapamN•1h ago
My favorite trick with <marquee> was to nest them, with different, alternating directions. You could make the contents alternate between scrolling and stopping by setting the inner marquee to travel in the opposite direction at the same speed as the outer marquee. Or do more levels with alternating speeds to make it zip around randomly. I think you had to set a max width for the inner marquees for this to work?
flomo•1h ago
"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."

> from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla)

And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.

atemerev•58m ago
I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
shawn_w•33m ago
I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
flomo•30m ago
Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's what Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)
4gotunameagain•1h ago
The good old days of writing html on the windows 98 notepad.

No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure, healthy, free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.

timpark•1h ago
The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!
burnt-resistor•51m ago
Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to shift the message back into the viewport.

What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing

geoffbp•44m ago
Image of a construction worker digging
burnt-resistor•22m ago
Yes. And it should be animated as the background image so you can't read any of the normal text in 6 px font without highlighting it.
AndrewStephens•45m ago
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
ryanthedev•26m ago
This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.
adamcik•6m ago
A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` around his middle name as a quick and dirty way to test for missing escaping and possible xss. Back in the day this was surprisingly effective at uncovering problems :-)

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