← Back to the <marquee> & <blink> plate

Source, and every claim on this plate was re-checked against the live source rather than taken from notes. MDN's <marquee> page returns 200, redirecting to /Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/marquee; MDN's <blink> page returns 404. The WHATWG rendering specification contains 64 occurrences of "marquee", which define the full animation behaviour at section 15.5.13, and zero occurrences of "blink". Chromium's html.css carries a marquee rule at line 82 and no rule for blink. Firefox's html.css carries its marquee rule at line 836 with the spec URL in a comment directly above it, and the vertical rule at 847 setting block-size: 200px. The only occurrence of the string "blink" anywhere in Firefox's stylesheet is a URL naming Chromium's Blink rendering engine, which is not a rule for the element at all.

The results are baked in as static content, deliberately. Nothing is fetched at runtime. A plate that depends on four third parties being reachable in order to make its argument is a plate that will one day make no argument, and this one is about things quietly ceasing to work.

Both tags in the cold open are the real elements. <marquee> scrolls because the browser still implements it, with no JavaScript and no CSS animation. <blink> is the real tag, correctly spelled, doing nothing, because it is parsed as an unknown inline element. The plate never fakes blinking anywhere a reader could mistake it for the tag, since the gap between correct markup and no effect is the entire lesson. The Conforming user agents may not blink the text sentence is quoted from MDN's text-decoration-line reference under CC-BY-SA 2.5, and text-decoration: blink remains valid CSS that parses, validates and does nothing.

Motion is gated, visibly. A page about scrolling and blinking that ignored a stated motion preference would be the worst possible version of it. Under prefers-reduced-motion the marquee is stopped through the element's own stop() method, which is the API the tag has always had, and the page says on its face that it has done so rather than just going quiet.

Deliberately absent. Any blink simulator or toggle that makes it blink after all, which would destroy the ending. Any other deprecated tag. The GeoCities authors' names and page content: the MIDI PAGE PORTUGAL has moved line is used as a markup pattern, and the site it pointed at is long gone. Also absent is any claim about when either tag stopped being used, because the sweep behind this plate found neither tag on any large period site, which is a finding about where they lived rather than when they died.

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