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Comment: Stating the Blinking Obvious


Source: UN, 14 May 2004
Submitted by Ann Light

In a note captioned 'Usability Irony', it was pointed out that a recent article on the ghastliness of blinking text, blinks in certain browsers. The offending article, which only became live in this way when your UsabilityNews editor copied the text innocently into the UN content management system, was a recent column: Blink, Scroll, Flicker: Three Ways to ruin your Website

The article should read (at my end):

'Blinking text was one of the most dreaded homepage effects in the 90's. It was easily achieved by using the &l"t;BLINK&g"t; tag and was viewed upon as a real newbie thing to do.'

So that you get something that has symbols not commands in it, like:

'Blinking text was one of the most dreaded homepage effects in the 90's. It was easily achieved by using the "<"BLINK">" tag and was viewed upon as a real newbie thing to do.'

Otherwise, as it was printed, in browsers that support the blink tag, the entire article from that point on blinks.

NB. In my browser, I didn't get the word 'BLINK' at all as the brackets worked to render it invisible to the screen. And for those wondering why I've added "" to the commands, well, otherwise it gets converted to an instruction again and we get the same problem. So please use your imagination about what the code should look like...


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