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BLINK and MARQUEE

Another unwanted feature discussed in Chapter 3 was the support of HTML tags such as BLINK and MARQUEE. These tags, and possibly others, implement a feature that users may not want to be displayed in web pages. The only way to disable these tags is to remove them before they are sent to the web browser. This can be done with an HTML ContentFilter that removes HTML tags from the HTML token object stream. Depending on the tag being removed, the ContentFilter may not want to remove the text associated with the tag. For example, "<BLINK>Flight 151 canceled</BLINK>", shows how the BLINK tag can be used to notify users of important information. If the ContentFilter were to remove the BLINK tag and all its contents up-to and including the /BLINK end tag, users would never see the important information. In this case the filter should only remove the tags BLINK and /BLINK and keep the associated text intact. An alternative to removing the tags would be to replace them with another tag. For example, BLINK can be replaced with the B tag to display the associated text in a bold font instead of blinking.


next up previous contents
Next: Background Music Up: Unwanted Features Previous: GIF Animations   Contents
Mark R. Boyns
1999-01-12