The marquee tag is a non-standard
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
element which causes text to scroll up, down, left or right automatically. The tag was first introduced in early versions of
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
's
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
, and was compared to
Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
's
blink element
The blink element is a non-standard HTML element that indicates to a user agent (generally a web browser) that the page author intends the content of the element to blink (that is, alternate between being visible and invisible). The element was ...
, as a proprietary non-standard extension to the HTML standard with usability problems. The
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
advises against its use in HTML documents.
Usability problems
Marquee can be distracting. The human eye is attracted to movement, and marquee text is constantly moving.
As with the
blink element
The blink element is a non-standard HTML element that indicates to a user agent (generally a web browser) that the page author intends the content of the element to blink (that is, alternate between being visible and invisible). The element was ...
, marquee-tagged images or text are not always completely visible on rendered pages, making printing such pages an inefficient (if not impossible) task; typically multiple attempts are required to capture all text that could be displayed where messages scroll or blink. The
behavior="alternate"
version of marquee makes text jitter back and forth but does not obscure any part of it if scrolling widths are set correctly.
Because marquee text moves, links within it are more difficult to click than those in static text, depending on the speed and length of the scrolling. Users only get one chance every time it scrolls past. Also, scrolling text too fast can make it unreadable to some people, particularly those with visual impairments. This can easily frustrate users. To combat this,
client-side scripting
A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how the assembly of every new web page proceeds, and includi ...
allows marquees to be programmed to stop when the mouse is over them.
Attributes
Unlike its blinking counterpart, the marquee element has several
attributes
Attribute may refer to:
* Attribute (philosophy), an extrinsic property of an object
* Attribute (research), a characteristic of an object
* Grammatical modifier, in natural languages
* Attribute (computing), a specification that defines a proper ...
that can be used to control and adjust the appearance of the marquee.
;Align: Uses the same syntax as the
img img or IMG is an abbreviation for image.
img or IMG may also refer to:
* IMG (company), global sports and media business headquartered in New York City but with its main offices in Cleveland, originally known as the "International Management Group ...
element.
;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'' – When used in absence of the 'Behavior' attribute, contents to be scrolled will slide the entire length of marquee but stops the moment it hits the end, so that the contents will be displayed. But if it is used with attribute 'Behavior' then the attribute 'Slide' will be ignored.
Loops are counted by each time it reaches each end of the marquee; a loop of 1 is different from 'Slide' attribute. when item is being scrolled with 'Slide' attribute, item will stop permanently at the end of length of the marquee, displaying the entire item. However, when an item is being scrolled without a 'Loop' attribute, the number of scrolls will be repeated according to what number 'Loop' is equal to. If 'Loop=1' then item will scroll only once and will exit the length of marquee completely, while the item being scrolled will stop would be the same as 'Slide'. By default, 'Loop=infinite' so it is not needed to code the attribute 'Loop' if you want a non-stop scroll. Note: 'Loop' will be ignored if attribute 'Behavior' is coded. Also, if 'Behavior=Alternate' and 'Loop=2' then item will go from beginning of the Marquee to the end and back to the beginning, counting a round trip as 2 loops.
:*''Alternate''- Scrolls the text from right-to-left & goes back left-to-right.
;Bgcolor: Sets the background color of the marquee.
;Direction: Sets the direction of the marquee box. Values are left, right, up, down where the value indicates the direction of travel. Direction=left therefore moves the text from right to left on the screen.
;Width: This sets how wide the marquee should be.
;Loop: This sets how many times the marquee should 'Loop' its text. Each trip counts as one loop.
;Scrollamount: This is how many pixels the text moves between 'frames'. So scrollamount=1 gives the slowest scroll speed.
;Scrolldelay: This sets the amount of time, in milliseconds, between 'frames', much like watching a replay of a video where every frame of the video would be paused for x number of milliseconds. 'Scrolldelay=1000' means a slow motion where every frame lasts one thousand milliseconds or one second.
A marquee element can contain arbitrary HTML, so in addition to text it could move one or more images, movie clips, or animated
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...
s.
Compliance
The marquee element was first invented for
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
's
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
and is still supported by it.
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Chrome and
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
web browsers support it for compatibility with legacy pages. The element is non-compliant
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
properties are used to achieve the same effect as specified in the Marquee Module Level 3, which as of 2008 is in the call for implementations stage. Similar effects can also be achieved through the use of
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
, or
CSS3 animations.
liMarquee_-_alternative_marquee_jQuery
_plugin..html" ;"title="jQuery">liMarquee - alternative marquee jQuery
plugin.">jQuery">liMarquee - alternative marquee jQuery
plugin.Creates horizontal or vertical marquee for text, images, goods, banners or logos
References
{{Reflist
HTML tags
Articles containing video clips
Web 1.0