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The BLINK-Free Home Page |
JCR
Design and Consulting The <BLINK>-Free Home PageDedicated
to the Ridicule and Suppression Accesses
to this site since 2/26/96: IntroductionUnless you have been living under a rock, only browsing the Web with Lynx, or both, you have no doubt seen many implementations of this most useless of all tags. Few things are so irritating. Perception experiments have shown that people are very sensitive to motion, including blinking, in the periphery of their visual field. It follows that blinking text on a Web page can only serve to annoy the reader and distract them from whatever else might be on the page. Please note that, even though Netscape brought this monster into the world, I don't entirely blame them for the fact that people actually use it. Netscape has introduced quite a few proprietary HTML extensions, and many of them serve very useful purposes. This page is primarily directed at Web page authors, especially those who are currently using the <BLINK> tag, which is where the real blame lies. Our mission is to get you to see the error of your ways and repent. Then you can hold your head high, and proudly proclaim yourself <BLINK>-Free. This page assumes that the goal of Web page authors is to attract readers to their site. If your goal is to irritate and repel readers, then, by all means, use the <BLINK> tag all you want.
The <BLINK>-Free FAQ
Top Ten Reasons to Make Your Pages <BLINK>-Free
Psychology of the <BLINK>If it's so lame, why do so many people use <BLINK>? The <BLINK> tag allows people to put a primitive sort of animation on their Web pages with very little effort. This is, of course, appealing. But, in Web pages, like in all designing and writing, you must consider your audience. And your audience is getting a headache from all that blinking. There is a similarity between the use of <BLINK> at this early time in the Web's history and the use of many fonts in the early days of the Macintosh. For the first time, people could use a variety of fonts and type sizes in their printed documents, and they sure did! You would see documents with over 20 different fonts on a single page, in a wide variety of sizes. It looked horrible. After the technology matured a bit, and people using it became more familiar with the techniques of the traditional arts of typography and page-layout, things calmed down a bit, and documents started looking a whole lot better. (An excellent little book on these techniques, by the way, is The Mac is Not a Typewriter, by Robin Williams (no she's not the actor) [Peachpit Press]) In the same way, I expect that the use of <BLINK>, and overly cluttered and confused Web pages in general, will fade as people become more familiar with the technology and as the technology becomes easier to use. Our goal is to bring that about as soon as possible, starting with the elimination of <BLINK>.How to Make Your Web Site <BLINK>-FreeWell, obviously, you can simply not use any <BLINK> tags anywhere on your page. This is the most subtle statement of all, and it is also very effective. Your page will look better than any page with blinking text. If you use <BLINK> tags, get rid of them. The design of your page can only improve. If you want to make a slightly more strident statement, feel free to copy any of the icons below for use on your own pages: I would appreciate it if you made these graphics hot links back to this page, something like: <A HREF="http://www.jcrdesign.com/blinkfree.html"> <IMG SRC="blinkfreeblack.gif" ALT="<BLINK>-Free Logo"> We support <BLINK>-free pages.</A> Or you could just refer to these icons on my server directly from your page, as in: <A HREF="http://www.jcrdesign.com/blinkfree.html"> <IMG SRC="http://www.jcrdesign.com/blinkfreeblack.gif" ALT="<BLINK>-Free Logo"> We support <BLINK>-free pages.</A> Siblings in ArmsOthers who have taken up the <BLINK>less call.
SlogansA short saying oft contains much wisdom.-- Sophocles: Aletes, frag.99.
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Updated: Friday, June 8, 2001 at 12:45 PM by JCR Webmaster@jcrdesign.com |
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©2001 John C. Rivard. |
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