In Defense of the Blink Tag
It was all the Advantage’s fault: their website immediately brought to mind the permanently underlined links, animated gifs and all other discarded relics from Web 1.0. The tags, the red italicized Courier Bold on bright green, the weird grey-and-serif: to be frank, I totally dig the site, and more than that, it reminded me of my love for <blink> tags.
I know they’re irritating. I know they were completely misused. But if Bertin’s retinal variables are:
- size
- value
- orientation
- texture
- color
- shape
- position
Then the blink tag is the HTML tag that truly makes use of the dynamic possibilities of the digital medium beyond what’s available in a conventional (e.g., paper) 2-d setting. The <marquee> tag is technically just a bastardization of positioning—not to mention it makes text less readable. But a properly used blink tag could be useful and graceful to boot.
Examples of the variables, in themed colors
Unfortunately, there is no way to properly use a blink tag. You can’t define how often it blinks or how many times, or how quickly it fades in or out; and without being able to control those variables, you end up with a dynamic element that outlives its usefulness. Generally speaking, whatever information you’d highlight with a blink tag needs to be noticed immediately and then acted on—at which point the blinking is just a distraction from the next important bit of data. If there was a way to have a blink tag turn off and on two or three times when a page is first loaded, they might still be around. We make fun of animated gifs, to be sure, but we still use them, and the ones we make fun of are usually simple and looped. But so far as I can tell, there is no way to manipulate the blinking of a blink tag, and the only built-in property seems to be “universally hated by everybody.”—Timoni
