Mozilla developers are currently debating how to drop support for the much-maligned tag.
With Opera moving to Google’s new Blink rendering engine, which, despite the name, does not support the blink tag, Mozilla finds itself in the strange position of having the only rendering engine that does in fact parse and display blinking text like it’s 1996.
Originally conceived (and implemented) as a drunken joke, blinking text isn’t just bad usability — usability guru Jakob Nielsen famously called “simply evil” — it can potentially induce seizures. Even if you aren’t prone to seizures, blinking text is downright annoying.
But while few may mourn the passing of the scourge, really, where would we be without it? Despite never being part of any HTML specification the blink tag managed to take the early web by storm, driven especially by the design prowess of early Geocities homepage creators.
Indeed without would there have been a Geocities? And without Geocities would there have been a MySpace? And without MySpace would there have been, well, let’s stop there.
Sadly, the end of the blink tag will not mean the end of blinking text on the web. It will ruin this fabulous Twitter Bootstrap theme we’ve had our eye on, but there are still plenty ways to get text to blink — CSS and JavaScript are both, regrettably, up to the task.
So far there’s been little protest about removing support from Firefox. There’s been some debate as to where or not the CSS 2.1 text-decoration: blink; rule should go with it (yes!), but the tag itself is most likely headed for the dustbin of web history.
