It was somewhere outside Barstow when
go****@charlief ortune.com
(charlie fortune) wrote:
have seen <marquee> get bad press here.
What's wrong with using it.
There are technical HTML reasons why it's a bad idea.
But the core problem is that the basic idea is inappropriate, for
reasons of graphical design and usability. Marquee belongs on Times
Square - you have a very limited space that you need to get the best
use out of, so you make text scroll across it. The web is different
though - you can have as much page space as you want, and each user
gets their own scrollbar. Although window space is still constrained,
it's better to allow _users_ to control scrolling than to have this
simple fixed speed approach.
If you want to, use <marquee>. it will work as well as it ever does,
in enough places that you don't need to worry.
But you should then forget ideas of "validation ", because you've
deliberately chosen not to go that route (this isn't such a bad thing,
so long as you understand where and why you're invalid)
It's also pretty much essential that any content you offer through
<marquee> is also repeated through an accessible technique. <marquee>
is inaccessible on non-desktop devices, to speech browsers, to
printing and a whole range of things. It's entirely reasonable
though to have a "Today's News" page which is a dozen news stories
from an RSS feed as (title line / description para) pairs on the page,
then to also run their headline titles across the top of the page in a
scrolling marquee, just as eye candy.
<marquee> is like JavaScript. It's not unreasonable to use it for
_additional_ eye-candy, but it's bad to make it essential.
As to the text file business, then I'd do that by importing the text
file into a little simple server-side PHP scripting (or other
favourite language). These days it's more likely to be RSS than text
anyway.
--
Smert' spamionam
