The Blink Tag, Asterisk, Caduceus

1. The Origin of the <blink> Tag

Back in the late '90s, I remember coming across the blink tag. It was horrible. Flash flash flash all over the place. Yuck. Well, today I found out how it came about in a Friday night discussion at a bar. The next morning, it had already been implemented in the UNIX version of Netscape! It spread to the Windows and Mac versions and was release with no fanfair. People found out and sadly the web became full of flashy nastiness!

2. Etymology of Asterisk

The word "asterisk" comes Late Latin asteriscus and Greek asteriskos which means little star. Compare with astro- for words related to the stars.

3. Caduceus

I learnt today that this symbol:

is called the caduceus, which comes from the Greek for herald's staff. It was carried by Hermes, the messenger of the gods.

Grep, Dry Skin, W3C Tools

1. What grep stands for

The first thing I learnt today is that grep stands for globally (g) search a regular expression (re) and print (p). (Thanks Jennie.)

2. Dry Skin

Apparently udder cream is really good for very dry skin. Yes, udder as in the thing cows have. I'd never heard of udder cream before.

3. W3C tools

Unicorn

I knew about W3C's HTML validator and CSS validator but I didn't know there is a combined tool called unicorn.

Cheatsheet

All I can say about this is how did I not know about it?

The cheatsheet has search functionality for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SVG, and XPath, as well as guidelines on accessibility, mobile best practices, typography, and internationalisation.