BlinkTag Inc » html

Origins of the BlinkTag

Brendan Nee — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:50:54 +0000

We named our company after the most hated HTML tag of all time. I just found a desciption of the origin of the BlinkTag by the person who came up with it, Lou Montulli. Its an interesting read, apparently it was meant as an easter egg and was initially undocumented:

“I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet.”

I like Lou’s reaction to the first time he saw the BlinkTag in the wild:

“It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.”

Read the rest of the Origin of the Blinktag.

The Blink Tag shows up on XKCD’s tribute to Geocities

Brendan Nee — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:48:19 +0000

In honor of Geocities shutting down today, XKCD redesigned their site in Geocities style. This redesign included a prominent use of the blink tag (including some HTML mistakes to show the markup).

Google Chrome Frame almost brings modern web standards to lame corporate office environments

Brendan Nee — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:36:59 +0000

I was really excited when I read about Google Chrome Frame yesterday. Its a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer that replaces the internals with that of Google Chrome, a much more modern browser that supports recent web standards and generally just works.

IE is notorious for rendering pages improperly and not supporting new web standards which basically require web developers to apply special hacks or design sites specifically for IE.

Google Chrome Frame is interesting because the user doesn’t need to seek out and install google chrome frame. If these people were interested in seeking out new software they probably wouldn’t be using IE6 in the first place. Instead, website authors can include a few lines of code that prompts users of IE to install the Google Chrome Frame plugin.

I set up a chrome frame test page with the google chome embed and lots of elements that don’t work well in IE6. and had a friend of mine who works for a very large bank where their computers are locked down to only using IE6 try visiting the page. I was hoping that somehow Google Chrome Frame would be allowed to install itself.

IE6 recently turned 8 which is about 4000 in internet years (its true, freshbooks claims 2007 was 1000 years ago). Its pretty neat that so many corporate users are relying on a web browser that is actually an antique.

Here are some screenshots from the failed process:

Google Chrome Frame asking if it can be installed. Sounds good.

The terms look good.

Lets run this

Nope. Close, but no chrome cigar.

Blinktag Inc is Born

Brendan Nee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:46:11 +0000

Why a new name? Horne Nee Inc was a bit too risque for some of our clients, and blinktag was too clever to pass up. We were able to get the desired domain name sans “i”, but figured that “i” could be an optional, blinking character in the name.

Why blinktag? The blink tag or blink element is a non-standard tag in HTML which causes the text to blink which was popularized by Netscape Navigator at the dawn of the browser wars. Its a bit of an inside joke among web developers as it renders text very unreadable, is a non-standard element and is not supported by all browsers. If you are using Firefox (or Netscape Navigator for some reason) this text will be blinking.

We thought blinktag inc was nicely ironic name, as we build accessible, standards compliant websites which generally do not incorporate the blink tag.