Lou Montulli, an early web browser engineer and Lynx co-author, writes about web history, including the origin of the blink tag.
HN links his blink tag history and cookies-era bio, and commenters note how much of today's web came from his contributions.
Blink was never a standard. Lou Montulli thought up the idea while drunk and then someone else implemented it for a joke.
"When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet. Then somewhere, somehow the arcane knowledge of blinking leaked into the real world and suddenly everything was blinking. "Look here", "buy this", "check this out", all blinking. Large advertisements blinking in all their glory. It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.
In the end, much was said, most of it in the form of flaming posts to various discussion boards, and the <blink> tag will probably be remembered as the most hated of all HTML tags. I would like to publicly state that at no time did I actually write code or even seriously advocate for the <blink> tag. It is true that I put forth the initial inspiration, but it really was merely a thought experiment. I am not going to name any names of the people who coded the dastardly deed, if they wish to step forward, they will need to do it themselves."
http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
Also, firefox used to have an option in about:config to allow the blink tag to be turned off.
Blink, the tag, dates back to the 1994 or so: http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
That's what they're referring to in the page.
In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/0764557394), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.
And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.
Note this was written by Lou Montulli who also wrote the amusing post about "The Origins of the <Blink> Tag" [1]
[1] http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
I didn't know about the about:about url, and have since found a number of amusing and useful links, for example:
Chrome:
chrome://site-engagement/
chrome://net-internals/#dns
chrome://net-export/
chrome://indexeddb-internals/#
Firefox:
about:mozilla
about:memory
about:robots
Netscape did a similar thing to this in 1994 with their Fishcam, converting frames from a video capture and served up as new frames of a GIF image. It was eventually shut down in 2007 and the original developer[0] setup a dedicated site for it: http://www.fishcam.com/
Nice to see the forgotten technology repurposed.
[0] http://www.montulli.org/lou
Huh.
I'd always imagined more circumscribed pentagrams were involved. And some chanting. And a cubicle.
<Blink> on, Lynx lovers. It does make sense in that context, especially after my recent 4-month battle with Ncurses.
edit: wow, this guy is influential. And no wonder he was considering Lynx in this: http://www.montulli.org/lou
I remember when <marquee> was considered something like IE's answer to the <blink> tag. I'd like to see an article about the origin of the <marquee> tag, much like that one about the origin of the <blink>tag[0] that you see going around now and then.
[0]http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag