We absolutely should expect historic pages to work in modern browsers (you want to just wantonly throw away history for no good reason?) And you absolutely cannot reliably run older browsers. This logic doesn't even work out right- So, once all the servers in the world break backwards compatibility with the old browsers (thus making them absolutely incapable of being run on modern networks), THEN we should go back to our modern browsers, and make them render the old pages again, after we dropped support. What?

What about pages that are intended to look like historic pages, because they are e.g. paying tribute to them, or mirroring how far a programmer has come from when he first started using the Internet.

I think there's enough cruft on today's bloated Internet that the blink tag is hardly a significant step in a right direction.

What old browsers can we still run reliably? Serious question.

Any. That's what VMs are for.

So johnny six pack who made a web site for his crochet club back in 1997 using microsoft front page is going to fire up a VM and install an old browser to look at it? uh huh.

Yes, much like I can never visit a faraway country because I can't pilot a plane.

So I need to have the level of skill needed to pilot a plane just to look at my old family photos, drawings and poetry? And you make products with the expectation from your customers, perhaps?

"Trust me with your data, I am a technologist. It's okay, I'll take care of it. Though I will expect you to fire up a VM if you still care about it 10 years from now."

And statically linked binaries, if necessary.

I agree that we shouldn't expect it.

Not expecting it is not the same as not wanting it - and the demise of <blink> is an expression of wants - or rather want nots.

It'd be interesting if we saw a browser actually version-compatibility break, in the sense of "HTML5 supported, HTML4 won't even render."