<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia for the Early Web

  • Many reminisce about 90s/early‑2000s web: <blink>, <marquee>, “under construction” GIFs, guestbooks, web rings, counters, spacer GIFs, table layouts, image maps, frames, and tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Fireworks.
  • Stories of hacks and workarounds: IE6 rounded corners via sliced images, frame-based chats before XHR, motion JPEG “streaming,” Netscape bugs, binary-editing browsers to disable blink.
  • Strong sense of “lost joy and wonder” and the accessibility of HTML then—kids learning by hand-writing sites in Notepad.

Actual Uses of <marquee> Today

  • Still used in niche or playful ways: animated personal homepages, parallax emoji scenes, news-ticker‑style RSS displays, truncated names in media UIs, tab labels, and retro-themed projects.
  • Some government sites (notably in India) still use marquees heavily, often alongside generally poor UX.
  • A few people unapologetically defend marquee as still useful for constrained text spaces or deliberate retro aesthetics.

Why Blink/Marquee Are Disliked

  • Core objections: moving text is hard to read, hijacks attention, and competes with the main content.
  • On the web, scrolling text is seen as unnecessary because layout can usually expand vertically; others push back that screen space is still finite.
  • Historical overuse and abuse (e.g., portal sites framing others’ content, attention-grabbing clutter) cemented a bad reputation.
  • Accessibility and usability issues: multiple scrollbars, broken back button, non-linkable content areas, and trouble with search engines.

Implementation and Compatibility Notes

  • <marquee> still works in modern browsers; in Chromium it’s implemented via CSS animations and requestAnimationFrame.
  • The default animation is noticeably unsmooth; tweaking attributes like scrolldelay helps, but many would prefer pure CSS.
  • Some legacy APIs and oddities persist (JavaScript’s String.prototype.blink, Android’s undocumented <blink> layout tag) for backward compatibility.

Security / Testing Uses

  • <blink> and <marquee> are used as cheap, visually obvious payloads for testing HTML injection/XSS.
  • Some deliberately whitelist marquee as an Easter egg; others use <plaintext> as an extreme “everything broke” indicator.

Broader Web-Evolution Debates

  • Long subthread on frames: nostalgia vs. detailed critiques (linking, navigation, responsiveness, accessibility, analytics).
  • Another on whether the web peaked around 2006–2010, the death of Flash, rising complexity, and Chrome’s dominance and impact on Firefox and open web standards.