Marketing Myself : marquee

Animation HTML

Sometimes full-blown video is a little overboard; in fact, just a little animation can spice up a Web page a great deal. Animation on the Web is used for many things; active logos, animated icon’s demonstrations, and short cartoons. There are a variety of animation technologies available to Web designers. Some of the most common animation approaches include animated GIF’s, Flash, and DHTML animations. Other animation possibilities also exist. Most notably, Java-based animations and older animation techniques such as server push are still possible, but the field has narrowed significantly. Very few of older or proprietary animation like Microsoft’s marquee tag live on.

blink
The much maligned blink tag was initially introduced to the Web by Netscape. Its simple goal is to make text blink, as shown below;
blink Buy Now blink (the < > were removed on a lot of these blink and marquee mark-ups)

It has no significant attributes and is primarily support only in versions of the Netscape browser and is not part of any HTML or XHTML standard. Interestingly enough, despite all the fuss about blinking text, it is actually part of the CSS2 specification, though it is not required to be support by CSS2-conformate browsers. So if you want blinking text that validates, try something like the below demo;

Buy Now (didn't seem to work correctly)

Text Animation with marquee

One approach to adding new support for multimedia is to add new elements and build in support to the browser for the object. This approach used to be very popular with browser vendors and is partially responsible for the proliferation of browser- specific tags. marquee is one example of a multimedia-like tag that is fairly common on the Web. Although marquee isn’t an embedded binary object, it tends to act like one in its support for hspace, vspace, height, and width attributes. In the proprietary HTML extension wars, Microsoft is the culprit for introducing the dreaded marquee tag, which is certainly as annoying as blink tag. Thanks to marquee , HTML authors now can create messages that scroll and slide across viewers screen in a variety of different ways. Like Netscape’s blink tag, marquee degrades fairly well and can be used by HTML authors who understand the ramifications of using such proprietary tags.however, the bottom line is that, in good conscience, authors shouldn’t recommend more than very occasional use of the marquee tag.

While initially supported only by Internet Explorer and some second-tier browsers such as MSN TV, marquee in now even supported in Mozilla-based browsers like Netscape 7, making it somewhat of a de facto standard even if it won’t validate. Using the element is simple; just enclose some text in it and it is transformed into scrolling ticker tape, similar to the one found on “Time Square”. a very simple continuous marquee could be set with the following mark-up fragment;

Welcome to Demo Company…the biggest fake company in the world !

Under browsers that support marquee tag, the enclosed text scrolls repeatedly from right to left. Under browsers that don’t support marquee, the text is displayed simply as plain text because the user agent should safely ignore the tag.

Tip; while Mozilla-based browsers support marquee, they do not support all of its attributes, such as scrolldelay, direction, and so on.