Bringing in Blink Feature for Microsoft Internet Explorer

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Introduction

I would like to start with a small history of why this Blink in MSIE requirement came at all. I had a small requirement for a small regional client here, in freelance. They wanted a blinking in certain parts of the page for information that he marks from the admin section of the site, basically to emphasize something new, something impressive information.

Tags Availability

I know there is a BLINK tag in Netscape, but again that does not work in MSIE, which has its own properitary MARQUEE tag for scrolling. I searched the Internet and got some custom BLINKERS, but then the blinkers made the page jump, every time, the DIV was set to invisible. After a long search, I got this small code snippet and which I refined it a bit and which I would like to share with everyone, so that anybody who is needing a similar code compatible across both MSIE and Netscape.

How to Use

Currently the attached zip file has only one static blink.htm page. The code between SCRIPT and /SCRIPT is the BLINK engine. Perhaps this codeblock, we can separate it to a separate blinkengine.js

Next, whereever we want the sections to blink, we need to encompass them into a DIV or LAYER for Netscape browsers and pass the DIV identification to the Blink function as a string. The text within the DIV would automatically start blinking.

TODO

Perhaps a lot more can be incorporated here. Within blink tag itself,you can incorporate features like Overlib Mouseover effect, if the number of lines to be blinked is exceeding a specified number of characters. Perhaps you could have observed, if the characters that are blinking are more in number, it is not visually appealing either. Isn't it? Overlib is a free download from http://www.bosrup.com/web/overlib/ It is a really a very good JavaScript to show mouseover tooltips and also configuring and calling the methods are easy too.

Summarizing...

I hope the above script, though is very simple and straight forward, can help developers worldwide to get a cross browser blink effect in JavaScript. Perhaps JavaScript beginners can start learning of timeout, cross browser detection etc and thier syntax from the code. Is'nt it?

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)