There was a brief period in the mid-1990s when a huge number of personal websites seemed to agree on one design principle: if text can move or flash, it should. Two HTML tags made that possible, they arrived from two competing browser makers within about a year of each other, and together they gave the web one of its most gleefully chaotic visual eras.
Blink
The blink tag's origin is, fittingly, kind of a shrug of a story. Lou Montulli — the same Netscape engineer who would go on to invent the web cookie later that same year — is often credited with the idea, though he's said in later interviews that he didn't actually write the original code himself. According to his account, the idea came up casually at a bar with Netscape colleagues, where he joked that making text flash on and off would be about the fanciest visual trick you could pull off in Lynx, a bare-bones, text-only browser he'd previously worked on. Someone else on the team took the joke seriously enough to actually build it, and blink shipped as a real HTML tag in Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995.
Used sparingly, blinking text can draw attention to something important. Used the way an enormous share of GeoCities pages, band fansites, and personal homepages used it — for entire paragraphs, headers, and "under construction" banners — it became one of the most widely mocked design choices of the era almost immediately, and web designers began recommending against it within a couple of years of its introduction.
Marquee
Microsoft, building Internet Explorer as a competitor to Netscape, didn't want to be left out. Rather than copying blink outright, an engineer on the Internet Explorer team built something arguably more elaborate: the marquee tag, released with Internet Explorer 2.0, also in 1995. Instead of flashing on and off, marquee text scrolled horizontally across the page — and it came with a full set of configurable attributes controlling direction, speed, and whether the text would loop continuously or bounce back and forth like a screensaver.
Where blink was a blunt, single-purpose gag, marquee was a genuinely more flexible (and, depending on your taste, more obnoxious) tool, and it spread just as widely across personal sites, scrolling everything from song lyrics-style greetings to entire navigation menus across the screen.
An unusual peace treaty
Both tags were, from very early on, controversial even among the people building the web's underlying standards — accessibility advocates in particular objected to both, since constantly moving or flashing text creates real problems for people using screen readers or with certain visual and cognitive conditions. Neither tag was ever part of the official HTML standard maintained by the W3C, the web's standards body; they were proprietary additions each browser maker built on its own.
In an unusual bit of corporate diplomacy, Netscape and Microsoft representatives reportedly reached an informal deal at a February 1996 standards meeting: Netscape would agree to drop blink from future versions if Microsoft agreed to drop marquee. In practice, neither tag disappeared quickly — both lingered in browsers for years afterward, kept alive largely by backward compatibility and by websites that had no intention of updating. Blink in particular survived remarkably long in some browsers; Firefox didn't formally remove support for it until 2013, nearly two decades after its debut.
Modern CSS still technically supports a text-decoration value called blink in some specifications, though virtually no current browser actually implements it — a small, mostly symbolic nod to an era when making text move, however badly, felt like the whole point of having a web page at all.