So, an interesting question came up recently: do we accept a request to be added to about:credits from the guy who coded the first ever implementation of the tag in Netscape Navigator?
I mean, I know this was the middle of the Browser Wars, but could he not have registered a conscientious objection or something?
In the end, I decided that it would be cruel to penalize him for lack of foresight, and he did other cool stuff anyway, so he’s now on there :-)
Disconcerting discovery of the day: it blinks even in Thunderbird, where I read this post. :-(
I find it amusing that if he’d waited for two more revisions of the file, he’d have had revision 1.337. :)
Anonymous: I really wish I’d thought of that! In the end, that honour went to Afrikaans localizer and l10n tools guru, Friedel Wolff.
Gerv
I think it’d be even more fitting if his actual credit (i.e. his name) in the credits was wrapped in a tag.
gah. forgot to escape. that should be “wrapped in a <blink> tag”
stevel: that idea was too good to pass up :-)
Gerv
Hey, I did the Mac tag (and we loved it, we wanted to find documentation for DOD MILspec blinking and say we were compliant), but the IDEA was actually Lou Montulli’s (any of you who have met him will not be surprised). Also wunderkind jwz did the Linux implementation but he did resist until the demands for it became overwhelming.
As a footnote, the Mac blinking I wrote was better than what you see today. I blinked the *background* between bg color and hilite color; the text did not disappear and reappear. So it was cool rather than annoying. However that was before background images had to be considered.
Mark Lanett
Let us give thanks for browser.blink_allowed.
<blinquee>
I’m just curious, is there a reason that there’s <a> tags nested within <h2>s when you could just assign the anchor’s name to the header as an ID and have the same effect without an extra tag?
> In the end, I decided that it would be cruel to penalize him for lack of foresight
So you decided to be cruel by outing him in public :)
Alan: Historical reasons. It could well be that, when that page was created, #whatever didn’t go to IDs, only names.
What I want to know is why Firefox still supports blink by default. Most of the other seriously heinous abuses of the browser wars have been redacted. Web browsers no longer (by default) allow websites to change the user’s desktop wallpaper, open unresizeable windows outside the visible screen area and without proper chrome, or change the contents of the status bar to hide the address of the link under the pointer. So why is blink still permitted by default?
Perhaps because it’s no longer abused, and does have limited valid uses – e.g. perhaps cursor support in Bespin?
Gerv
Blinking even made it into the first CSS specification as:
text-decoration: blink;
Blinking even made it into the first CSS specification as:
text-decoration: blink;
so one might argue the element should go the path of , , , etc: deprecated.
Making the name of this person blink is a cute little geeky wink but it goes against the spirit of “about:credits” where everybody, like in a commune and regardless of their contributions, is displayed the same. There are so many pieces of technology that were implemented for the first time ever by a Mozilla contributor. Why giving such a prominence to the blink tag? What about the Table guy? The Javascript guy? What about me? I spent countless hours on something as stupid as getting the H1-H7 font aspect ratios right in strict and quirks mode on the Mac. Can I have my name in H2? (please don’t) Should we display everybody’s name in a size proportional to the number of lines of code they have contributed like a tag cloud? But then what about folks like mtoy and tara who probably never checked in anything but contributed in an unforgettable way? It’s a can of worms we might not want to open.
I agree with what Pierre has said. If the concerned individual feels so strongly about the name being highlighted, then rather rename ‘Mozilla Firefox’ to ‘Mark the legend Lanett Firefox’ or something.
Mohit: It wasn’t his idea, it was mine. It’s was a joke. J. O. K. E. Can everyone stop taking this quite so seriously? And certainly don’t get angry with Mark.
I needed to look at my cache entries for a moment and when I was done, it hit me that I’ve never looked at the credits page before. So I did, and saw the blink-de-blink going on.
Funny… and well played sir.