<marquee> alternative
 

A client has asked for, effectively, a <marquee> at the top of each page
to draw attention to promotion of his latest offers.

My view is that these look somewhat old-fashioned and that the tag was
obviously depreciated for a reason. So as, a compromise, I put in a
<ul> and wrote javascript to fade the <li>s in and out, meaning that if
javascript wasn't available the <ul> would display as a plain list, and
there was also a button to change it back to a plain list.

The customer didn't like this and still wants having scrolling text of
some sort. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions, or can point
me towards some pre-written scripts that might be what I'm looking for?

--
Marc Bradshaw
BEA Solutions Ltd.

Portsmouth, UK

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

Marc Bradshaw wrote:

> A client has asked for, effectively, a <marquee> at the top of each
> page to draw attention to promotion of his latest offers.

Good for his competitors.

> My view is that these look somewhat old-fashioned

Right, and they don't work the intended way. People just don't wait to see
what's coming. People may even actively ignore all animation that looks like
advertisement.

> and that the tag was
> obviously depreciated for a reason.

It was never part of any HTML spec. "Deprecated" means, in HTML parlance, a
feature that browsers are required to support but authors are discouraged
from using.

> So as, a compromise, I put in a
> <ul> and wrote javascript to fade the <li>s in and out, meaning that
> if javascript wasn't available the <ul> would display as a plain
> list, and there was also a button to change it back to a plain list.

Why? It's the same bad idea implemented in a clumsier and less reliable
manner.

> The customer didn't like this and still wants having scrolling text of
> some sort.

Your call. Do it if you just want to get paid. If you respect the customer,
tell him why the idea is bad.

There are other methods of animation that may work reasonably well. Using
Flash probably gives maximal flexibility. Simple animation like text that
gets replaced by other text could be implemented as an animated GIF or using
simple timed JavaScript. But the customer should first decide what he really
wants. This also depends on the page as a whole.

Animated content tends to either get ignored (as I wrote) or to draw all of
the user's attention, so that nothing else on the page really matters. So
animation could make sense e.g. on an error message page where it highlights
a button for getting online help with the error situation.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

On May 10, 11:37*am, Marc Bradshaw <mbrads...@beasolutions.com> wrote:
> A client has asked for, effectively, a <marquee> at the top of each page
> to draw attention to promotion of his latest offers.
>
> My view is that these look somewhat old-fashioned and that the tag was
> obviously depreciated for a reason. *So as, a compromise, I put in a
> <ul> and wrote javascript to fade the <li>s in and out, meaning that if
> javascript wasn't available the <ul> would display as a plain list, and
> there was also a button to change it back to a plain list.

> The customer didn't like this and still wants having scrolling text of
> some sort. *Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions, or can point
> me towards some pre-written scripts that might be what I'm looking for?

Marquee comes from the browser war era when IE had marquee and
Netscape had flashing text. Although not part of modern W3C html,
marquee will still be displayed on many browsers now in use.

What you do to please your client is your call. However if you will go
to http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex2/index.html you will find
a glut of free scripts for all sorts of moving text. There are demos
of most and what browsers the scripts work on is pointed out. Using
the scripts is mainly a matter of copy and paste. You could show some
of these effects that strike your fancy to your client and let him or
her choose one with little effort. A few still turn script off, so you
might want to include a no script path if that is of concern.

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Marc Bradshaw wrote:
>
>> ...... the tag was
>> obviously depreciated for a reason.
>
> It was never part of any HTML spec.


But it will be part of HTML5.
All browsers of today support marquee and have supported it for quite
some time already. If I recall correctly, Mozilla decided to support it
a few years back because of the popularity of this IE proprietary
element in the Chinese market.

--
Gus

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

In article <gu79tq$80p$1@news.motzarella.org>,
Gus Richter <gusrichter@netscape.net> wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> > Marc Bradshaw wrote:
> >
> >> ...... the tag was
> >> obviously depreciated for a reason.
> >
> > It was never part of any HTML spec.
>
>
> But it will be part of HTML5.
> All browsers of today support marquee and have supported it for quite
> some time already. If I recall correctly, Mozilla decided to support it
> a few years back because of the popularity of this IE proprietary
> element in the Chinese market.

The validator at validator.w3.org, when including the marquee element
marks the doc invalid and remarks:

"by using vendor proprietary extensions such as "<spacer>" or
"<marquee>" (this is usually fixed by using CSS to achieve the desired
effect instead)".

In the OP's case, not so simple to just use "CSS". OP might be able to
persuade client to use the loop attribute to limit the annoyance? Use an
odd number if you want the text to end up on the left!

I suggest as a controlled annoying:

<marquee behavior="alternate" loop="3">This is some text</marquee>

--
dorayme

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

Marc Bradshaw wrote:
> A client has asked for, effectively, a <marquee> at the top of each
> page to draw attention to promotion of his latest offers.

Tell the client no.

> My view is that these look somewhat old-fashioned and that the tag was
> obviously depreciated for a reason.

Because it's a stupid thing to do. But it was not _deprecated_, it was never
part of any HTML specification.

> So as, a compromise, I put in a
> <ul> and wrote javascript to fade the <li>s in and out, meaning that
> if javascript wasn't available the <ul> would display as a plain
> list, and there was also a button to change it back to a plain list.

Equally bad.

> The customer didn't like this and still wants having scrolling text of
> some sort.

Fortunately I can choose my clients. If one of them wants, for example, a
marquee I tell them no, and then attempt to educate them in the error or
their ways.

If they insist I suggest they might be happier with some *other* developer.

> Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions, or can point
> me towards some pre-written scripts that might be what I'm looking
> for?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marquee+scripts

Pick any one of the quarter of a million hits. Then pick one of the one
point eight million hits for

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+marquee+is+bad :-)

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

Thanks for everyone's comments.

Ben C wrote:
> The behaviour is in CSS3, so presumably the idea is the default
> stylesheet will just set the new properties on marquee elements.
>
> But it is at least defined properly in CSS3. IE marquee is totally
> weird. Inline but the full width of the container by default (and other
> strange things no-one understands).

Yeah, I found this: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-marquee/

It seems it can be applied to static text as a presentation format.
Does anyone know how widely this is supported yet?

I also found this which is a javascript (jQuery) script which makes the
<marquee> tag scroll more smoothly and slower. But I suppose at the end
of the day it is still scrolling text.

http://remysharp.com/2008/09/10/the-...mooth-marquee/

At the end of the day, I understand my client's reasons - he wants to
draw attention to this text more so than the rest of his page. Thus
being distracting is his objective. I just don't want to cause
accessibility issues and I very rarely put live a page which doesn't
validate, and I'd hate to ignore the HTML specifications for the sake of
some scrolling text.

--
Marc Bradshaw
BEA Solutions Ltd.

Portsmouth, UK

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

Hi cwdjrxyz,

cwdjrxyz wrote:
> What you do to please your client is your call. However if you will go
> to http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex2/index.html you will find
> a glut of free scripts for all sorts of moving text. There are demos
> of most and what browsers the scripts work on is pointed out. Using
> the scripts is mainly a matter of copy and paste. You could show some
> of these effects that strike your fancy to your client and let him or
> her choose one with little effort. A few still turn script off, so you
> might want to include a no script path if that is of concern.

Yeah, I saw that. The problem is that most of those scripts are ancient
- the newest I found was 2002 - and none of them use semantic mark-up.
Some even rely on the scrolling text content being in the javascript!

If I'm going to give him a marquee of some sort, I'd at least like it to
follow basic accessibility good practice so that if they have javascript
disabled the existing HTML will work just fine, thus my <ul>.

--
Marc Bradshaw
BEA Solutions Ltd.

Portsmouth, UK

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

On 10 May, 17:37, Marc Bradshaw <mbrads...@beasolutions.com> wrote:
> A client has asked for, effectively, a <marquee> at the top of each page
> to draw attention to promotion of his latest offers.

Fair enough. Just make sure that you present it in a way that's not
especially annoying, is just about readable, and most importantly that
you address accessibility in general by only using it to show content
that's already available by other means.

I wouldn't mark it up with <marquee>, for two reasons:

* The default presentation of <marquee> is generally poor (over-
irritating), even when it is supported. You ought to implement marquee-
like behaviour with your own JavaScript (or Flash, or even JavaFX) and
so there's no _need_ to use <marquee> as content markup.

* <marquee> is purely presentational markup, no describing the
structure of the content. So even notwithstanding the question of
whether it's permitted under your chosen HTML doctype, it's not a
great piece of markup anyway. As you've seemingly already done, a list
is a good way to markup the content (wrap it up with display: none; to
hide it generally, after all you're only duplicating existing
accessible content).

The rest is JavaScript frog-work, and a bit of design creativity to
keep your client happy (fixated on one idea, looks at the same page
too often) whilst retaining good usability for your site visitors
(never been to the site before, have a goal-centred task in mind,
don't want to be distracted by rubbish in the meantime)

You might find looking at the BBS News site and their ticker
interesting.

If your marquee is a series of clickable links (and I can't think of a
justification for one that isn't) then make sure they're easily
clickable, without having to play a game of "whack-a-mole" to select
the link. Maybe slow them, stop them, or even skip backwards slightly
when you hover the mouse over. The BBC's marquee looks nice, but it's
hard to select for navigation.

Re: <marquee> alternative
 

On May 11, 4:15*am, Marc Bradshaw <mbrads...@beasolutions.com> wrote:
> Hi cwdjrxyz,
>
> cwdjrxyz wrote:
> > What you do to please your client is your call. However if you will go
> > tohttp://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex2/index.htmlyou will find
> > a glut of free scripts for all sorts of moving text. There are demos
> > of most and what browsers the scripts work on is pointed out. Using
> > the scripts is mainly a matter of copy and paste. You could show some
> > of these effects that strike your fancy to your client and let him or
> > her choose one with little effort. A few still turn script off, so you
> > might want to include a no script path if that is of concern.
>
> Yeah, I saw that. *The problem is that most of those scripts are ancient
> - the newest I found was 2002 - and none of them use semantic mark-up.
> Some even rely on the scrolling text content being in the javascript!

If you think some of these scripts are ancient, you should have seen
some of them just a few years ago when they had to use 3 paths to
support IE4 (document.all), NN4 (layers), and (getElementBy ID) for
more modern browsers. In many cases these scripts have been changed to
support modern browsers, and often support for such as IE4 and NN4 has
been dropped resulting in much shorter scripts. Usually just a few
minor changes will bring the script up to modern standards. If you
write in any version of xhtml, scripts may contain code that causes
xml errors and hence throw errors in the xhtml validation. The most
easy way to overcome this is to use the script as an external script.
Also you now use <script type="text/javascript">. Some of the older
scripts may use language only instead of this, and that throws an
error on html validation. Other than that, the nuts and bolts of
script have not changed so much over several years. Scripts that use
evaluate( ) a lot often are quite old, but still often work. The
people over at the javascript groups are more than happy to point out
what is wrong with depending on evaluate in most cases. I see nothing
wrong with having the scrolling text content within the script. You
just have to have some text message in the noscript path in case
script is turned off, and that message might not be the same as for
the scrolling text.

> If I'm going to give him a marquee of some sort, I'd at least like it to
> follow basic accessibility good practice so that if they have javascript
> disabled the existing HTML will work just fine, thus my <ul>.