Huh, I would have sworn that Internet Explorer had the blink tag at one point, but I think my parents had Netscape and then Mozilla pretty early so maybe that's what I'm confusing it with.

Regardless, I stand by my comment. Monsters! I want my browser to be obnoxious.

Never mind, Microsoft got you with <marquee>.

In theory, in 1996 Netscape and Microsoft agreed to kill <blink> and <marquee> <https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html>, but although they were kept out of the spec, neither removed its implementation, and then IE dominated the browser market, and <marquee> became popular enough that the remaining parties were bullied into shipping it (Netscape in 2002, Presto in 2003, no idea about the KHTML/WebKit timeline), and so ultimately it was put into the HTML Standard.

KHTML added <marquee> support in October 2003 (commit 7bcdd98aa in the Chromium repository).

I have to say, that is some excellent sleuthing.

I think I remember reading articles about how to implement blink in IE using behaviors, some IE only thing that didn't take hold(?), Maybe this was around IE5.

IE was holding back the progress even before Chrome and Safari were a thing.

> IE was holding back the progress

Oh those times. IE accepted <table><tr><td><tr></table> whereas Nestscape demanded <table><tr><td></td></tr></table> and would just not render anything else - just blank grey

Humans loved it, when they had to type all this by hand, because missing /td would not kill your page.

Permissiveness won out.

I also remember the day JavaScript hit the net.

and all those "chat rooms" that did <meta refresh> to look live suddenly had no defence against this

<script>document.write('http://twistys.com/folder/porn.jpg')</script>

or alert bombs

Oh those times. <script>document.createElement("table").appendChild(document.createElement("table"))</script> would crash IE, and some similar stupidities could even cause a BSOD as late as Windows 98.

(I think that was one such incantation, but if it wasn’t quite that it was close.)