Eggshell Green

Because I’m a Geek

While doing a bit of reading about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I came across a page from 1998 about Text Decoration with CSS.

It talks about blinking text which I remember using alongside the good old “Site under construction” animated gif when I was an Internet noob.

The page states:

Therefore, only CSS1-aware versions of Netscape Navigator are going to see the following effect:

H4 {text-decoration: blink;}

This might be a blinkin’ H4

Lovely, isn’t it?

NO! It is not lovely, and I justify using capitalisation, strong and emphasis styling on that statement!

Luckily for us there are now web guidelines that discourage this sort of rubbish and we don’t really see these things too often today.

Even Lou Montulli the creator of the original <blink> tag (which has since been deprecated and replaced by the above text-decoration) admits that it is The worst thing I’ve ever done for the Internet.

It was just funny seeing how someone thought that using blinking text was lovely.

And who uses Netscape anyway…?

See also my Foolery Four #11 comic. I created this even before seeing the note on the W3c User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 that states in Guideline 4 flashing content may trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. I thought I was being exteme, but I guess not!

Tags: geek, Internet