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/...
I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the animations are done via marquee tags: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
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?
I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection.
I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities because marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody intentionally uses, making it easy to identify when an attack works.
I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects of HTML injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it really shouldn't move" is something people understand better than "this text is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."
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!
"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.
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 :-)
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused.
However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page.
It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.
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.
Ahh, good times. I ran a "college dorm floor" website off my computer for a while and included a 997-word marquee on it, just rambling and talking about girls, depression, and philosophy. At the very end there was an exclamation point that was a href to a hidden page. Of course, someone hit view source to read the stupidly long message and found the page anyway.
I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0].
My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface.
You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you needed Flash.
The space must flow…
Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags.
The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still there for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape the argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
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.
I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.
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.
I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/ UAPs that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line up a bunch of drones that can communicate with each other via directional (or just weak) radio or laser transmissions. Then when a drone on one end of the line receives a radar pulse from an aircraft (etc.), it sends back a stronger pulse than its reflection would be, and simultaneously signals the next drone in line. That drone sends off a radar pulse and signals the next drone in line, etc. The effect, as viewed from the aircraft with the radar, would be a somewhat larger (or more reflective) target moving rapidly. The line of drones would not need to be straight, in which case it could simulate a fast-moving object that suddenly turns.
A coworker of mine unironically added a marquee tag to an internal tool we were working on. Not as a joke, he just googled how to add scrolling text and copy pasted it, without knowing the history behind it
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]
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/...
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>This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.
Android also supports a `<blink>` tag in layout XML. It's not documented well, but it's still in the latest source: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of the requirements was to use IE-only elements on your main website to promote usage of IE. Marquee was one of the least obnoxious ways to do that compared to other options.
needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.
The day I discovered that marquee tags have a direction attribute, using which you can make the text go up/down left/right and use multiple of these tags, is still etched in my memory.
90s web:
Blink was used almost entirely for annoyance value - in other worse, all its uses were annoying. Marquee was the slow news ticker at the side you could ignore if you wanted to.
You can put a marquee inside a marquee and make the DVD bouncing logo.
Did that on my first day of college, inside an .hta file for windows and blew my classmates minds. #hackerman
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.
in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is one of the worst things you can do to your users, please don't use this" which they sadly removed.
here is the German version: https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425
They took away the <blink> tag from us, due to what can only be explained as the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in modern browsers, and late stage capitalism.
However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill: https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
Controversial take: marquee is still useful, and I still use it!
Nowadays you just reimplement them in CSS.
without the marquee tag how were we supposed to build the scrolling LCD screens that dominated our physical electronics?
I think <marquee> is even worse than <blink> (even if you do not use CSS).
Something else I have to explain to Gen Z existed at one time.
HN hug of death?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...