The secret of internet business is website traffic flow. You design web pages, with different font faces, different graphics, colors and most importantly helpful and interesting pieces of content – all doomed to attract readers across the globe and increase the traffic flow to your web pages. And since we've come a long way advocating the tactics and techniques of using assorted HTML tags, I'd like to put forward a piece of advice to all my HTML-literate friends out there. Guys, just for the sake of grabbing some attention NEVER rely on the frail shoulders of some of those contemptible HTML attention drawing tags; rather, deliver some compelling content and this will do the magic for you – it’ll make your readers not only return to your site over and over again, but also they will refer others to your site.
Talking about the contemptible HTML attention drawing tags, truth be told folks, I personally never advocate the use of HTML <blinks> and Marquees. Why? You'll get to know about it very shortly.
Welcome to Lesson 18 – NO <blinks> and MARQUEES Please!
When Netscape for the first time embarked on their new-fangled hi-tech web browser they proffered a new take on the mass interest, courtesy an exclusive set of tags. A set of tags that would make an important piece of text/ word/ phrase flicker sporadically in the web page. And as per the standards of World Wide Web conglomeration, it was not something that Netscape released globally. It was simply a feature that was worked upon to make it all functional on their web browser.
Having learnt so much about HTML and its role in brining about the phenomenal change in the web world it's time that we turn the pages of HTML history, and make out what we endured. Today’s creation is the blinking text, but in the world of HTML, blink tag is presently a tag that is being looked down upon for several reasons. Today, the blink attribute: <blink>Congratulations!</blink> is considered to be a substandard approach to text presentation commanding a web browser to blink the text constantly. And once again I repeat it’s a pet peeve if you call it so. You put in the blink tags with the intention to draw the attention, but it only brings back with it nothing more than exasperation! Without any kind of insistent reason, circumvent the blink tag. And the worst part of the story is yet to be heard – the blink tags fail to work on all web browsers! Yes, it suffers incompatibility! If you are viewing a page with blinking text in Netscape your tagging works fine. But try it out with Internet Explorer, and to your dismay you'll find nothing!
And it was the non showing of the <blink> tags that inspired the folks over at Microsoft to create yet another typical tag meant to function with Internet Explorer - <marquee>Congratulations!</marquee>. Marquee, huh? Never heard of it? Well... you must have seen web pages wherein the texts scroll across your computer screen. That is the marquee effect. Texts enclosed within the marquee tags are displayed like a paper-chain (one letter scrolling in at a time) across the page. So if you are viewing a page with texts bearing the marquee effect in Internet Explorer, you will see the transcript marching across the screen. But quite unfortunately once again, marquees never seem to work with Netscape! Good Lord! What works with Internet Explorer doesn't work with Netscape and vice-versa! This is just the case with two browsers. Who knows what are still left to be unveiled with other web browsers? So why take the risk of using browser specific tags?!
Unless you are chained down to structure a chain of web pages, it is better that you avoid HTML tags like <blink>...</blink> and <marquee>...</marquee>.
Original Authors: Rajat
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 26/05/2009
