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is a Netscape proprietary tag, and was created by Microsoft for its Internet Explorer browser. As elements of the famous browser wars, the two tags have long been vilified, even labeled evil. The tags reflect the early influence of advertising on the Web: flickers text like a neon sign; runs text along the bottom of aWeb page like a ticker-tape message.Webzine pioneer Suck blasted as a “micro-ad,” warning,“Soundtracks, exotic buttoneering, inline video,and of course,even more absurdly pervasive animation flash is creeping up on a terminal near you.” didn’t fare much better. Jakob Nielsen wrote, “A web page should not emulate Times Square in New York City in its constant attack on the human senses: give your user some peace and quiet to actually read the text!” Neither tag is used with frequency today. Imagine, if you will, a Web page author in 1995. Armed with a working knowledge of HTML 2.0, a text editor, and a computer, he crafts his first Web page. Making mistakes, correcting them, forgetting elements, replacing them, he plugs on, determined to make a page that works! He finishes the file, names it, copies to his rudimentary server—a speedy 486—breathlessly trots to a computer five feet away, loads the earlygeneration browser, and . . . eureka! There in front of his eyes is a Times New Roman masterpiece,innocent of any knowledge of Web pagedesign, its white background contrasting starkly with the jet-black font, and, at the bottom of the page, a moving phrase, creeping slowly from right to left, little verbal ants treading inexorably across a picnic cloth: Welcome . . . To . . . Our . . .Web . . . Page. . . . Or, flashing intermittently and continuously: T H E E V I L T A G S , A N D Two Icons of Early HTML and Why Some People Love to Hate Them Bob Whipple 7 9 8 • Howdy! (Howdy!) (Howdy!) (Howdy!) The great thing about HTML, of course, was the fact that text no longer behaved as text when the HTML page was viewed through a browser. No longer did text just sit there. Instead, with the (arguably, as we’ll see below) creative use of tags, text moved. Text shook. Text jumped around. Text blinked. And text walked. In short, text did things that it had never done before. With HTML, the sameness and stasis of traditional text was now (more or less) easily augmented by the possibilities of graphics, pictures, and animations, not to mention the capability of hyperlinks. (Click—wait a moment—and shhhhwwoooom!You’ve been taken to another page! It’s magic!) And so went my introduction to multimediation, HTML, Web pages, Web servers—and the and tags. As they did with me, these tags fascinated many new HTMLers creating their first Web pages. These elements, like most HTML, were simple to insert and simple to type, consisting, in their most basic forms, of a word with carets on either side. Both tags could be tuned more finely; , for example, could have additional specifiers governing the timing between blinks. But, as with so many things, too much of a good thing is still too much. The perceived overuse of these tags soon after their invention caused irritation and denunciation in the early-HTML mid- to late 1990s, both as a result of their overall obtrusiveness and hard-to-miss-ness, as well as the fact that they just wouldn’t stay still; they were viewed as the evil twins of Web design. The 3,000-year-long cultural memory associated with text made—and makes—readers feel more comfortable with words staying where they are on the page. Until very recently, we have expected our text, like perhaps our children, to stay still and be quiet. Fat chance. and didn’t do what they are expected to; indeed, they did what someone else—the Web author—told them to do, and what they seemed to do, especially in 1995, was flout conventions of what text should do—or, rather, not do. In effect, and were the rebellious teenagers of HTML: always moving, never still, appearing where they’re not expected, then disappearing, But it’s both too easy and incorrect to dismiss these two as simply evil twins. and , among other tags, broke the fourth wall T H E E V I L T A G S , A N D • 9 9 [3.15.5.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 17:26 GMT...

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