Marquee tag

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The marquee tag is a non-standard HTML markup element type which causes text to scroll up, down, left or right. The tag was first introduced in early versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and was compared to Netscape's blink element, as a proprietary non-standard extension to the HTML standard with usability problems.

1 Usability Problems
2 Attributes
3 Compliance
4 See also
5 Notes

[edit] Usability Problems

Because text within a marquee is not always visible, it violates the basic nature of web pages, which are eminently skimmable. Users typically glance over a page and decide what, if anything, to read (using headlines, bold text, bullets, etc.), but marquees, like the blink element, hide text at certain points, meaning at any given time, scanning the page may fail (or take longer).

Links within marquees are notoriously difficult to click, and users only get one chance every time it scrolls past. This can easily frustrate users.

[edit] Attributes

It must be noted that the following proprietary tag is deprecated and use of it goes against the advice of the W3C. The following information is for encyclopedic purposes and should not be used on new web pages.

Align: Uses the same syntax as the img tag.
Behavior: Allows the user to set the behavior of the marquee to one of three different types:
- Scroll - DEFAULT. Scrolls the text from right-to-left, and restarts at the right side of the marquee when it has reached the left side.
- Slide - Deprecated
- Alternate - Text 'bounces' from the left side of the box to the right side.

<marquee behavior="alternate">This text will bounce from left to right</marquee>

Bgcolor: Sets the background color of the marquee.

<marquee bgcolor="blue">This marquee's background color will be blue.</marquee>

Direction: Sets the direction of the marquee box to either left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down and down-to-up. Later browsers added support for a movie credit style bottom-up and top-down values.

<marquee direction="right">This text will scroll from left to right.</marquee>

Height: This sets how tall the marquee should be.

<marquee height="20px">The height of this marquee is twenty pixels.</marquee>

Width: This sets how wide the marquee should be.

<marquee width="100px">This marquee is only a hundred pixels wide!</marquee>

Loop: This sets how many times the marquee should 'Loop' its text.

<marquee loop="2">You will only see this text twice before it stops playing.</marquee>

Scrollamount: This is how many pixels the text moves between 'frames', in pixels.

<marquee scrollamount="10">This text will move ten pixels per 'frame'</marquee>

Scrolldelay: This sets the amount of time, in milliseconds, between 'frames'.

<marquee scrolldelay="1000">This would be so slow, you'd get no sense of animation.</marquee>
<marquee scrolldelay="1">This would be so fast, you couldn't see it!</marquee>

[edit] Compliance

The marquee element type was first invented for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and is still supported. The Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers support it for legacy page compatibility, although many other browsers do not. The tag is considered unofficial in proper XHTML or HTML. An equivalent for the tag is however being designed for the future releases of Cascading Style Sheets. ^[1] Similar effects can also be achieved through the use of JavaScript on a webpage.