{"id":254,"date":"2010-10-19T20:46:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T03:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kai.mactane.org\/blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2010-10-24T13:19:54","modified_gmt":"2010-10-24T20:19:54","slug":"motion-distraction-worse-than-the-blink-tag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/2010\/10\/19\/motion-distraction-worse-than-the-blink-tag\/","title":{"rendered":"Motion Distraction — Worse Than the <Blink> Tag"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, Netscape invented the <blink> tag. And people saw the <blink> tag, and put it on their web pages, and thought it was good. And the rest of us saw the <blink> tags on those pages, and screamed, “No, you morons, it is bad!<\/em> It distracteth the user mightily, for lo, our eyes are built to take especial note of motion and changes in light, for they might signal the approach of predators.”<\/p>\n

And so, in the fullness of time, most people learned to never, ever use the <blink> tag. And that was good, for a while. But more recently, people have started putting new — and even worse — moving doo-dads on their sites: Animated Twitter feeds.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about the kind of feeds that refresh or scroll every five seconds (or sometimes more frequently). You can see them all across the web. Here are just a few examples:<\/p>\n