Frederik Braun �Someone remind me, why did they remove and deprecate the `<blink>` HTML element but not the `<marquee>` element? Actually, scratch the first part. Why did they remove the former?
Dave Townsend@freddy I would guess because implementing blink in JS has been trivial for a long time. Marquee would require smooth animations that maybe were only available later
Wladimir Palant@freddy Is that a serious question?
That was back when the web was largely static, JavaScript being a very basic language and almost never used for animations. These two were used to make things slightly dynamic, and they were annoying as hell. But I think the official reason was that <blink> had no semantic meaning and was purely presentational (still, <b> was merely deprecated and never removed). I don’t really remember why <marquee> was spared, but I suspect that removing <blink> was easy – it would just become static text, no big deal. <marquee> might be used for overlong text and not supporting it would mean that part of the text became inaccessible.
Mathieu Pillard@freddy (it's been a while so I might be missing / misrepresenting some details) <blink> was never properly standardized, and lacked adoption and support. By contrast, <marquee>, because it was supported by IE, did get used by a signifiant enough number of websites, notably in Asia. That forced Chrome, Firefox and Safari to support it to ensure compatibility with a bunch of legacy websites, and in turn eventually caused it to be specified in HTML5, though it's qualified as obsolete.
Vadim Makeev