<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
41 comments
·June 8, 2025donatj
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/...
shawn_w
>Who here remembers frames?
I visit a site with frames several times a week. Nobody's ever told the Open Group/POSIX people they're not supposed to use them these days.
perilunar
Been there, have done (most of) this. Never used Silverlight, but did use VRML, Java Applets, and Chromeffects.
I remember writing image maps by hand, getting the point coordinates directly from the image in Photoshop.
Re version control: learned very early on to make a backup of a website before making any changes. Our version control was /site/yyyymmdd/
iforgotpassword
I made a webchat with frames; an infinitely-loading top part for the text, and the bottom an input box that received 204 to not reload when you sent a message. I guess that was the most elegant way to do it in the IE4+ days. The top part could also receive a small <script> that would reload the frame on the right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
vanviegen
I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab) working on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding <script> tags from JavaScript. The server would delay answering until there were new messages available, or some timeout. This was even before xmlhttprequest. Who needs websocket? :-)
42droids
Started in 1998 with front page.
atemerev
Spacer gifs, OMG, the memories! <table> should be enough for everyone.
What is the motion jpeg hack? I made my own streaming too before websocket... but I never heard of this.
ryanthedev
This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.
timpark
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!
TapamN
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?
flomo
"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.
atemerev
I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
flomo
Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's what Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)
shawn_w
I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
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burnt-resistor
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]
geoffbp
Image of a construction worker digging
AndrewStephens
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
yakattak
I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.
latchkey
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.
90s_dev
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.
dgfitz
“Username checks out” - Reddit
Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.
satiric
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/...
seanhunter
The correct use is alongside the “man with a spade”.jpg to let people know your page is under construction.
bitwize
"Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!"
mbo
I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website (https://maxbo.me) as a allusion to news tickers (which are themselves an allusion to ticker tape machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape)
bradly
I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some multi-axis marquees for rain effect.
[0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)
edoceo
Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
8n4vidtmkvmk
Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an actors name when it's too long to fit under their profile pic. Seems like a good use.
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90s_dev
Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/2...