blink element

<blink>New!</blink> switched its text on and off about once a second, for as long as the page stayed open. Netscape shipped it in the 1990s. It became shorthand for everything wrong with early web design, and it has been gone from every browser for more than a decade. It still turns up in old templates, pasted signatures and pages nobody has touched since.

Why avoid

It is obsolete, and nothing blinks anymore. The HTML Standard lists blink among the elements that “are entirely obsolete, and must not be used by authors”, maps it to HTMLUnknownElement, and defines no rendering for it at all. Firefox was the last engine that blinked. Mozilla removed the element in Firefox 23, in 2013. The markup is dead: its text simply shows, like any unknown inline element.

What it asked for is an accessibility failure, and that’s the part worth remembering. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide, Level A, requires that “moving, blinking or scrolling information that (1) starts automatically, (2) lasts more than five seconds, and (3) is presented in parallel with other content” can be paused, stopped or hidden. Blinking is singled out because people with attention deficit disorders find it “distracting, making it difficult for them to concentrate on other parts of the web page”. W3C’s failure technique for this exact element, F47, is now itself marked obsolete, since “the blink element is obsolete in the HTML Living Standard and currently has no modern browser support”.

The danger today is the fix. Someone notices the tag does nothing and brings the effect back with a CSS animation. That is the same failure under a new name: technique F112, “using blinking content that lasts for more than five seconds without a mechanism to stop it”.

Use instead

Nothing. Remove the tag and keep the text:

<p><strong>Offer ends tonight.</strong></p>

If something genuinely needs attention, make it static and meaningful: <strong> for importance, or role="alert" for a message that has to be announced. Don’t use motion.

Detectability

Fully detectable by tag name. There is no autofix: removing the element would delete the text inside it, and fixes can’t unwrap an element to keep its content.

Resources

• HTML Standard — Non-conforming features — blink is entirely obsolete.
• HTML Standard — Elements in the DOM — blink maps to HTMLUnknownElement.
• Mozilla Bugzilla 857820 — completely remove <blink> element — fixed for Firefox 23, the last browser that blinked.
• W3C — Understanding WCAG 2.2 SC 2.2.2: Pause, Stop, Hide — blinking content must be pausable; why it harms users; F112 for CSS-recreated blinking.
• W3C — WCAG Technique F47: using the blink element — the failure technique, marked obsolete because no modern browser supports the element.