WebGyver Revisited

Blink property still alive and well in CSS

Posted by admin on January 23, 2009

You know, for years I’ve been hearing jokes about the <blink> tag in deprecated HTML code by inexpoerienced web designers, and somehow, I though to myself, “Surely, nobody is actually still using BLINKING text anymore in today’s web development.”

Then I read through pages of PayPal developer documentation for a recent project and found this beauty:

Hey, I’m not saying it’s really, really bad, but I was a bit surprised. Perhaps it is an internal issue at PayPal, and perhaps they’ve been getting a lot of support calls about finding the link for the PDF version of the Order Management Integration Guide. Then I thought, “Aren’t there better ways of addressing such issues?”

Then I took a quick look at the source code:

Because I, too, do silly things if I don’t get enough sleep, I am not going to make any snide remarks about the web design practices of others. They have their own reasons for doing what they’re doing, right?

Still, after a while, the blinking “PDF” text really started to annoy me. Why? Because I’ve been told over and over again that it’s bad practice and poor usability to use BLINK? Or because it’s simply . . . annoying? I don’t have a good answer, but I know I won’t be using the BLINK property in any of my web work if I can somehow help it.

If you’re so smart, what would you have done? Good point. How about nice little icons? One for the PDF link, and another one for the forum? After all, the idea is to catch someone’s attention, right? Perhaps something along these lines:

Of course, I am not saying that my quick-and-dirty idea is better than what the developers at PayPal did, but it’s different. In the end, as I said, we all have our own reasons for doing what we do — and the way in which we do it.