The origin of the blink tag

From Lou Montulli:

Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

I can think of at least a dozen examples of features that creep into a product on a whim, only to become monkeys on a project’s collective back that take years to shake off. One such example is the register_globals setting in PHP which finally managed to get deprecated in PHP 5.3 (and, the way things are going, may never disappear altogether) after much fighting and gnawing of teeth.

But the really interesting thing here is that <blink> is perhaps the most egregious example of what’s wrong with HTML. The existence of register_globals is problematic in many ways, but it is consistent: as long as you have a version of PHP that supports it installed, you will have the opportunity to use it¹. When it is discarded, it ceases to exist, so that rewriting your code becomes a prerequisite to upgrading to a new version of PHP.

In HTML, when a single vendor adds a non-standard feature, it immediately creates a significant problem for every developer: if you don’t take advantage of it, your application is not as good as it could be². If you do, you now have to maintain separate versions of your code for each browser.

Of course, standards are what is supposed to prevent situations like these from arising in the first place—except that no vendor seems to be capable of following them properly.