Of Blink.

Back in the day when Netscape was Mozilla or even before, the most annoying HTML tag known was blink. ESR put Blink as the number one way that you knew you were in HTML Hell. Blink has few supporters.

I blame Jamie Zawinski because he has spent so much time denying that he had anything to do with the annoying tag.

Blink (as I have mentioned here before) is the name of a new book by Malcolm Gladwell which has been widely reviewed and advertized — most recently on SlashDot where the comments are more interesting than the review itself (the purpose of a good Slashdot review is to generate comments ;->). Blink, the book, which I have only flipped through but have read as it appeared in the form of articles in the New Yorker as Gladwell’s Tipping Point had appeared before it. To cut to the obvious, the book is a collection of well-written, easy-to-read New Yorker articles with some glue added. The result is another highly anecdotal strongly narative book that draws on research that is not footnoted or cited well. Like a blink, the book is fast, subtle, alluring to the right person, but mostly on the shiny unchallenging surface and without links to what is beneath it.

Note: Microsoft managed to invent something even more annoying than blink, the infamous MARQUEE tag. Talk about something really annoying, distracting and obnoxious. You can see what’s wrong with MARQUEE in a blink.