In the beginning there was HTML. But it was dull and lifeless until the <blink> tag came along and made it come alive. Then came JavaScript to meet our increasingly sophisticated text blinking needs. A year later CSS arrived to separate the concerns of document structure and text blinking in an elegant way. It helped us survive the browser wars relatively unscathed.
In 2006, Sass (and a little later Less and Stylus) appeared to make text blinking less painful. But the real highlight of the year was the grandiose entrance of jQuery, which was, until quite recently, the way to make text blink through DOM manipulation. The defiant $ function was the Spartacus which led JavaScript to a successful revolution that would end up enslaving their former master HTML.
Then began the dark age of IE6 compatibility. IE6 made consistent cross-browser text blinking unnecessarily complicated. All the other browsers had nicer blinking features, but people kept using the damn thing until big names abandoned it and took a firm stand ("we want blink!") to put the final nail in its coffin in 2010.
2010 was also the year AngularJS came along to make us question the ways of the one true JS library, the Holy jQuery. The mighty $ was challenged by ng-, but stood its ground and still survives today.
Three years later, in 2013, came <React /> along with its JSX syntax. By this time you needed JavaScript programs to compile your JavaScript programs into JavaScript programs... to make nicer and better performing blinking texts. Some thought of JSX as a counter-revolution by HTML loyalists, and some as the final blow to HTML's hegemony over JavaScript. Whichever is true, it did save the web: This was also the year that Firefox decided to kill the mighty <blink> tag! If it wasn't for React, the PascalCase offspring of the long forgotten originator of all things web would not exist: the shiny new <Blink> component!¹
Did I forget what? Come on, need I mention the F word? To its credit, it was the best way to make images blink for quite a long while though!
¹ The implementation thereof is left as an exercise for the reader.
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