From an email I sent to a designer last week…
“In reponse to your request, text can be made to blink on and off on a web page by use of the ‘blink’ tag, however we strongly recommend against this for the following reasons,
- It is only supported by Netscape and Gecko based browsers, which means users of Internet Explorer (currently about 75% of users) will not see any effect from it.
- Workarounds to make text blink in Internet Explorer are extremely complicated and time consuming.
- The blink tag is not part of the W3C HTML standard and therefore there is no guarantee that it will continue to work in new versions of browsers – even those that currently support it.
- Blinking text is incredibly irritating to visitors, particularly when more than two or three words are set to blink.
- It is the most hated and derided tag in the entire HTML language (as a Google search on ‘blink tag HTML’ will confirm) and any designer using it opens themselves up to unlimited ridicule.
That said, if the client insists we will put blinking text in – on the understanding that most people visiting the site will be unable to see it, and most of those who can see it will be annoyed by it.”
He decided against using blinking text 🙂
