http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

I am widely credited as the inventor of the <blink> tag. For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the <blink> tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying. I won't deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

Back in 1994 I was a founding engineer at Netscape, prior to that I had written the Lynx browser, which predated all of the other popular browsers at that time. Lynx had been and still is a text only browser and is commonly used in a console window on UNIX machines. At Netscape we were building software that used a graphical user interface and could express vastly more text styles and layouts as well as images and other media. We spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the web and new technologies that would enable new classes of documents, applications and uses. A few examples of those thoughts were, HTML Tables, SSL for secure communications, Plugins for extensions, and JavaScript to enable dynamic HTML.