[thelist] Scrolling Marquee

[James Aylard]

Rob Smith wrote:

> The <marquee></marquee> tags are still ok to use right? They're not
> depreciated by something else?

    Since you've already been given the sermon on the proprietary nature of
the marquee element, the sinfulness of contemplating its use [1], and a
brief history of human social evolution, I'll sidestep those issues, for the
most part.
    The important thing to keep in mind is that, since marquee is
proprietary, you will want to understand how its use might impact your page
design in browsers that don't support it. If you are developing within a
controlled environment, such as an Intranet, that may not be much of a
concern. Just be aware of potential side effects and plan accordingly.

> In a test, I'm using this tag to scroll through announcements and
> whatnot, but there's an annoying behavior I'm noticing:
>
> There is a long sentence  |  With some more text  |  However as soon
> as this message plays  |  There's a really long break  |  Before the
> text starts Over.  |  Is there any way  |  To make this marquee
> continuous?

    Your best bet is to refer to the MSDN reference for the marquee element
[2]. There are several variables that affect how it operates, and you might
find that playing with those will improve its performance. Also, if you are
placing your message within an element that itself has padding or margins
applied, that will most likely create a larger gap.

1. Keep in mind, folks, that Mozilla _still_ supports not only the "blink"
value for the CSS text-decoration property (which is standards-compliant,
though not required by the CSS 2 recommendation), but also the
Netscape-proprietary <blink> element -- even when using a strict HTML DTD -- 
up to and including Mozilla 1.7b.
2.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/marquee.asp

James Aylard