Back in the prehistoric days of the Web, an interesting situation arose around a fledgling company called Netscape and a behemoth from the north known as Microsoft. In early 1995 - nearly two decades ago in Web years - Netscape's browser quite literally owned the browser market share. It had successfully displaced both the primitive text-only workhorse Lynx and the senior-thesis-turned-phenomenon Mosaic.
In a show of unbridled adolescent arrogance, the brash, young Netscape thumbed its nose at the world by developing a clever little tag called blink>. "We own the Web," it seemed to shout, "and you and your silly little standards can't do a thing about it." The tag was the antithesis of what HTML stood for, a blatant scar on the purity of a structural language.
Even so, the mightiest of all software companies would not be outdone. Microsoft, in a moment of profound significance, volleyed back with marquee>. Moving far beyond simple blinking text, this tag spewed words across the screen like a stock market ticker tape in an endless line of marching characters.
If you'll agree with me for a moment that they are equally atrocious blemishes on the face of HTML, then I'll take a step into dangerous territory. I'll argue that blink> is actually _better_ than marquee>. That's right, the most derided tag of all time, the source of endless rants, is actually a much more appropriate addition to electronic publishing than its Internet Explorer competitor.
Here's why: blink>, for all its annoying abuses, is actually an idiom that knows no real-world counterpart. As useful as marquee> may appear at face value, it actually relies on a mechanical-age information-delivery mechanism that was designed the way it was because there was no choice. Ticker-tape machines from the 19th century were created to constantly stream stock-market information in a manner that made sense at the time: If you can't display the bits on a screen (because, well, they just didn't exist), then you'd have to print them on paper. And in order for the paper to be continuously fed into the machine, it would have to be a long tape. Therefore, the business leaders of the day grew accustomed to being fed their data on little strips of horizontal media.
Now flash forward to the Web. Ever notice how every "paradigm-shifting" technology we see offers a new and improved way of getting stock quotes? Makes sense, I suppose, considering the people you have to convince to fund your start-up company are going to be attracted to that sort of information. Therefore, almost since the beginning of the commercial Web, stock quotes have been the killer app. And what better way to show stock quotes than the historically proven method of a ticker tape, which just happens to be _really_ easy to emulate on a computer screen. Bingo! Every Web-enabled application in the world, including Internet Explorer, suddenly required a marquee>-like feature.
So why is this bad? And why on earth is blink> better? Because the ubiquitous stock ticker relies on a mechanical interface, not a digital one. Would the designers of the original ticker-tape machines have used the long strip of paper if they could have relied on digital technology to display the information? Of course not. So why should you, on your Web pages? Another example: Remember those communication applications that used a telephone keypad on the screen to dial your modem? You had to poke at the buttons with your cursor to enter the number - ridiculous! Let mechanical interfaces stay in the real world, where we have things like physical laws to deal with. In the digital world, we're free to develop all the new idioms and interfaces we can imagine, free of the constraints of the old days.
And that's why blink> is better. It may be annoying. It may be the worst addition to the Web yet. But it's a far better step in the right direction. Only in the digital world can text methodically turn on and off. It's an idiom from the world of consumer electronics - digital clocks and VCRs asking to be programmed, blinking to the world that they need attention.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should actually _use_ it....
