The Animated Cursor Trail

1996

A GeoCities-era cursor accessory GIF, the kind that trailed sparkles, hearts, or fairy dust behind the mouse pointer. Place: JavaScript hobbyist tutorials, Dynamic Drive, Geocities scripting archives Figures: anonymous JS hobbyists · copied through view-source · DHTML community Somewhere in 1996, a JavaScript hobbyist posts a snippet that attaches a series of absolutely-positioned tiny GIFs to the document body and updates their coordinates on every mousemove event, each one trailing the cursor by a longer delay. STARS. SPARKLES. TINY HEARTS. PUMPKINS in October. A flock of bats around Halloween. The effect is called the CURSOR TRAIL and within eighteen months it is on hundreds of thousands of personal pages. Distribution is entirely view-source. Visitor sees the trail, hits View Source, copies the script and the GIFs, pastes both into their own HEAD tag. The original author of the canonical snippet is unknown; Dynamic Drive (a tutorial site) hosts the most-copied version by 1998 with a credit line that itself credits an earlier anonymous post.