The Origins of the <blink> tag (2008) (opens in new tab)

(montulli.org)

53 pointsFBT11y ago9 comments

9 comments

9 comments · 5 top-level

shubhamjain11y ago· 4 in thread

Great Read! I have been mulling over the idea of creating a curated list of interesting Programming Stories. Here are some of those which I can remember from top of my head:

* 500 Mile Email [http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html]

* Infinitely Profitable Program [http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55]

* The PGPi Scanning Project [http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/]

* DirectX vs OpenGL [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055/75581]

Think anyone can contribute?

Someone11y ago

You definitely want the graphing calculator story [http://www.pacifict.com/Story/], and likely also want to look at folklore.org, for example the -2000 lines story [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...]

There's also the stories of Knuth inventing and writing TeX and Metafont because he isn't happy with the way his books are typeset and of RMS and the Xerox 9700, but I don't know whether these have been written well yet.

dizzystar11y ago

I've always liked The Story of Mel: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

keithpeter11y ago

The Royal McBee LPG-30 was the computer that Edward Lorenz was using to solve his simplified atmospheric model when he noticed a difference between different runs of the program depending on the rounding error when typing in parameters from the printout of a previous run.

logone11y ago

I'm unsure if this would qualify, but here's the story behind favicon.ico: https://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-favic...

gus_massa11y ago

This has been submitted many time. Most popular previous submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490069 (158 points, 1727 days ago, 33 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797878 (13 points, 307 days ago, 8 comments)

Also relevant. Remotion of the blink tag in Firefox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170392 (101 points, 599 days ago, 93 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182690 (309 points, 597 days ago, 146 comments)

This last submission has two interesting comments, that I'll copy partially:

> I fixed blink in Mozilla twice in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. [...]

> You can put jwz's blink in your browser profile's userContent.css to make it work on all websites [...]

3stripe11y ago

Juuuuuuuuuuuuust in case anyone hasn't seen this before...

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?q=blink+tag#safe=off&q=blink+...

ColinWright11y ago

I suspect the title has been Bowdlerized, omitting the relevant "<blink>" from it.

Understandable, but annoying.

halviti11y ago

I think this is from an old newsgroup post, if i'm not mistaken.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

The Origins of the &lt;blink&gt; tag (2008) (opens in new tab)

The Origins of the &lt;blink&gt; tag (2008) (opens in new tab)

9 comments

9 comments

The Origins of the <blink> tag (2008) (opens in new tab)

The Origins of the <blink> tag (2008) (opens in new tab)