<marquee> and <blink>

The markup, as written

Here are those two lines from this page, as text. Both tags are spelled correctly. Both are valid. Neither has a typo.

<marquee bgcolor="#FF00FF" scrollamount="6" behavior="scroll">
  *** WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE ***
</marquee>

<blink>ATTENTION:</blink> <a href="...">MIDI PAGE PORTUGAL has moved.</a>

No error, no fallback, no gap. <blink> is parsed as an unknown inline element and rendered as plain text. Correct markup, zero effect, silent.

That second line is a real one, from a GeoCities page. Blink was never decoration. It was a siren for a single word, and the emergency it most often announced was a moved page, in a web with no redirects. The site it points at is long gone. The siren outlived the emergency.

Run the autopsy yourself

Six cells. Click each one. Every answer was checked against the live source before it was written here.

How a tag actually dies

Not deleted. Defanged. From MDN's own reference for text-decoration-line:

blink: The text blinks (alternates between visible and invisible). Conforming user agents may not blink the text. This value is deprecated in favor of CSS animations.

MDN Web Docs, CC-BY-SA 2.5

And the grammar, still current:

text-decoration-line = none | [ underline || overline || line-through || blink ]
                     | spelling-error | grammar-error

text-decoration: blink is valid CSS in 2026. It parses. It validates. It does nothing. The standard kept the word and legalised ignoring it, so nobody had to remove anything or announce anything. The tag is still in the grammar, and every browser has agreed, in writing, to pretend it is not there.

Field marks

• <blink> renders as plain static text. No error, no fallback, no gap. An unknown inline element, silently.
• <marquee> still works with no JavaScript. It is in the standard at 15.5.13 and in both engines' default stylesheets. Firefox even cites the spec URL in a comment above its rule.
• bgcolor on a marquee. The period scroller was a colored band, not just moving text. It was doing the job of a news chyron.
• scrolldelay=5 and scrollamount="2". Period authors tuned marquees as fast as the tag allowed. Revivalists tune them slow. Same attribute, opposite instinct, twenty-five years apart.
• Vertical marquees are exactly 200px tall. marquee:is([direction="up"], [direction="down"]) { block-size: 200px } is in Firefox's stylesheet. Nothing else on the web has that number.

What it solved, and what took it

You could make a page move with a tag, in the document, with no permission and no toolchain. Because it was a tag, anyone could read how you did it and do it too.

Neither tag was on any of the big sites of the period. Sweeping Microsoft, Apple, CNN, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, HotWired and Netscape's own home page turns up neither one. Both lived almost entirely on personal pages, which is the part worth keeping: motion on the web began as something amateurs gave themselves, and the vendor who won the standards fight is not the one whose tag survived.

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