Marquee tag

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. It is deprecated by the W3C and not advised by them for use in any HTML documents.

Usability problems

Marquee text is distracting.^[1] The human eye is attracted to movement^[2], and marquee text is constantly moving.

Because marquee text is not always visible, it violates the basic nature of web pages, which are eminently scannable^[3]. 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).

Because marquee text moves, links within it are more difficult to click than those in static text, and users only get one chance every time it scrolls past. This can easily frustrate users.

Attributes

• 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. Text disappears when looping finishes.
  • Slide - Same as Scroll except that the text stays there after the loop(s) if a loop(s) is set.
  • Alternate - Text 'bounces' from the left side of the box to the right side. Loops are counted by each time it reaches the other end; a loop of 1 would be the same as Slide.

<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>

• 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>

Compliance

The marquee element type was first invented for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and is still supported. The Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Chrome 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. ^[4] Similar effects can also be achieved through the use of JavaScript on a webpage.

See also

• Blink element
• HTML element
• Non-standard HTML tags

Notes