172897 - [RFE] Disable blink tag or make them less intrusive

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Ulrich]

Only few page have <blink> tags nowadays, but it's still a problem: Blinking
text can be read by two words at a time... then they disapear and you have to
wait until they appear again... then you can read the next two words... then
they disapear again.

Example: http://www.onlinereporter.com/

I suggest to either turn of the <blink> tag completely, or to make it fade to
50%  and back (easy with Quartz, I hope) so that you can read the whole time.

Comment 1

[Niklas Dougherty]

<p style="text-decoration: blink">Do you also suggest crippling standard CSS
elements?</p>

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Michael, you can disable blinking by adding:

 user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);

to your user.js file.

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

Actually, this is a dup.

Comment 4

[Greg K.]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19258 ***

Comment 5

[Michael Ulrich]

> Michael, you can disable blinking by adding:
> user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);
> to your user.js file.

I don't think this is the optimal solution to the problem. Chimera wants to be a
browser that "just works" with standard settings for everybody who runs it. Joe
User can't change a config file. He will just sit there trying to read the
blinking text, which is very difficult, and hate the experience.

But we don't want to disable the functionality, either. We want blinking on the
screen.

So, as a compromise that works for everybody, I proposed a solution where black
blinkingin text on a white background would fade to grey and back to black
slowly, much like some buttons is OSX pulse to indicate "return key = this
button gets clicked". That way, there is blinking, but everybody can read
through the blinking text without having to stop every 2 seconds because the
text went away. And if it's made well, nobody will need a config file to turn it
off - so it's a solution that works for everybody (although nobody would be
angry if the config file trick would be left in it).

I think this is a low priority bug for the reasons that blink-tags don't occur
often and that it might be difficult to program the proposed solution. If you
have a simpler idea that works for everybody, please tell us. But please don't 
set it to resolved - the current solution still doesn't work well.

Comment 6

[Steve Smart]

I would suggest we simply have BLINK off by default and let sadists turn it on
manually in the prefs.js. There is absolutely no reason to support this element;
the CSS2 spec says (my emphasis):

blink

Text blinks (alternates between visible and invisible). CONFORMING USER AGENTS
[p. 32] ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SUPPORT THIS VALUE.

Comment 7

[Michael Ulrich]

I would be fine with turning it off. I just though some users liked the 
blinking. Silly me :-)

Comment 8

[Greg K.]

Guys, this discussion was already had on bug 19258. If you want to file a new
bug suggesting a fading blink, then file it. This one's a dup.

Comment 9

[Michael Ulrich]

Does it matter if we discuss this on the old bug, on this bug or a new bug? I
think we should just stay focused: we have a problem and should find a solution.

I propose the following steps:

First: does everybody agree that the current solution doesn't work for the
intended general audience?

Second: If yes, we should find possible solution. Does anybody have different
solutions?

Three: If we have several possible solutions, we should take one that everybody
agrees on.

Comment 10

[Steve Smart]

I think this bug is related to bug 106462, not bug 19258, i.e. what Micheal said
in comment 5 about how "Joe
User can't change a config file. He will just sit there trying to read the
blinking text, which is very difficult, and hate the experience." We certainly
aren't going to add soemthing like that to the Chimera UI, which is why I
proposed that we have the tag off by default. Like Micheal, I don't fell
Mozilla's solution of making it an editable prefs.js setting as implemented in
bug 19258 is good enough for Chimera, where we aren't expecting our average user
to be editing prefs files, but at the same time we aren't going to go on to put
this in the prefs UI as is being done for Mozilla in bug 106462, so we need some
bug open to discuss what we're going to do instead of implementing a blink
option in our prefs. Perhaps the summary on this bug should be revised to
indicate that we aren't talking about the prefs.js optioin.

Back on topic, the fading solution is very elegant; I just made the suggestion
that it be off by default because that's a simple change in our preferences
variables that could be made in a minute, whereas the fading thing will require
a good deal of code, and I'm sure the devs aren't going to have time to work on
things like that in the forseeable future, so changing the default is a good
interim solution, at least.

Comment 11

[Greg K.]

If you want to discuss it, you should do so in the newsgroups. That's what
they're for.

Comment 12

[Michael Ulrich]

Sorry for putting several ideas inside one single bug and discussing ideas in
the wrong place. I have created two better focused bugs:

Bug 173537: Disable blink-tag as default behaviour
Bug 173540: [RFE] Make blink tag slowly fade text to 50% and back

I've changed the status of this bug to "invalid", hope this is the correct.

Comment 13

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.