Back in the bad old days, there was an HTML tag called <blink>. It did this, which everybody hated, because it was annoying, and everybody’s web pages looked like this:

An interesting bit of history, courtesy of Lou Montulli, early Mozilla engineer and author of the Lynx web browser which was the granddaddy of them all, explaining the origin of the <blink> tag’s presence in the first version of Netscape: “We were drunk.”.

This tag was the first thing I can recall ever being removed from HTML, the language used to code web pages.

So as a rare expression of frustration and contrarianism, I have brought it back, coding it using modern standards so you can now once again throw <blink> tags around whatever you want to annoy your users.

It’s pretty simple. All you have to do is add this to your page’s CSS:


/* Define the blink animation */
@keyframes blink {
  50% {
    opacity: 0;
  }
}

/* Apply the animation to the blink element */
blink {
  display: inline-block;
  animation: blink 1s step-end infinite;
}


This CSS will:

• Create a keyframe animation that toggles opacity
• Apply it to any <blink> elements
• Use step-end timing function to create the sharp on/off effect like the original
• Repeat infinitely with a 1-second duration

You can use it like this:

<blink>This text will blink</blink>

Here’s that code in action: This text will blink

If you prefer to use a class instead of the <blink> element (which is more semantic, and thereby defeats the purpose of being maximally backwards and inefficient), you instead use:


@keyframes blink {
  50% {
    opacity: 0;
  }
}

.blink {
  display: inline-block;
  animation: blink 1s step-end infinite;
}


Then use it as:
<span class="blink">This text will blink</span>

Here’s that unnecessarily modern and correct usage in action: This text will blink

Go forth and blind your users! Or, as an ancient internet curse put it:

May your tags blink in eternity!

Bonus: alternate featured images gallery

I had a lot of fun making the featured image for the article “Resurrecting the <BLINK> tag“. Here’s some of the also-rans.

~ Click any image to enlarge ~

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Under current US copyright law, unaltered AI-generated images are not copyrightable. However, all AI-generated content on this site has been subjected to a subsequent creative process of manual human edits and alterations, bringing them back into the realm of human authorship. All original content on this site, including AI-assisted images, is ©2024 Michael Kupietz.