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Experts Opinion Poll

Hello all!

I am simply looking for a bunch of opinions on a topic. and that topic is......"Due to improvements in what browsers can handle, is the marquee tag acceptable to use?"

Personally, I use it to display a very small news ticker along the top of my site. I have tested the marquee tag in IE6, Netscape 7.1, Firefox, Avant, and Opera, and it works in all of them. When I first started coding HTML <marquee> was a huge no-no. Whatre your thoughts now that it is handled by all major browsers? Is it still a useless tag? Should Javascript alternatives still be used?

BTW, I do understand that marquee is not a part of the W3C standard for HTML or CSS, so we dont need to hear all your rantings and ravings about standards. I'm simply asking if you feel it has now become useful since it enjoys cross-browser support. Thanks!

I will split the points among all of those with good, insightful, valid answers.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Zyloch

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Zyloch

In truth, I feel if you don't need it validated or whatever, and you're looking for simplicity, I'd say go with <marquee>. It's just that no one ever uses it anymore even if it works (half the world probably doesn't even think it still exists). When it first came out, there came the many Javascript ticker scrollers that were compatible with NS4 so they've stuck.

On thinking about it more deeply, the main thing I can see that Javascript tickers are better than marquees are the including of external documents in tickers. I can't tell you what a <marquee> has or doesn't have anymore--indeed, I remember using it only once, but if you want a vertical ticker, Javascript might be better

Regards

flow79

ASKER

Zyloch - good points!

I agree that you have a bit more customization with JS, but I do not feel that it is easier to include external documents in JS. I personally have my marquee display the news from a database I have built and access it using ASP. It is very simple to loop through that day's news and display it in the marquee.

SOLUTION

seanpowell

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Zyloch

Only one thing to say:
...

Wow, I should buy one of those! I mean, if it helps fund Mozilla...

seanpowell

And Mozilla IS trying to get it built in...
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979

flow79

ASKER

thats awesome sean! lol - def a big fan - i may have to actually drop some bank to buy that shirt.!

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Diablo84

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COBOLdinosaur

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Esopo

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garethdart24

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flow79

ASKER

very good points everyone (but enough about standards!! :o) lol ) I will leave this open for a bit longer to get any more opinions from people.

BTW, if you want to see the news ticker I have created - here is the code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>News Scroller</title>
<style type="text/css">

</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="marqueetitle">News Ticker</div>
<div class="holder">
<marquee scrolldelay="100" name="marq" id="marq" onMouseOver="this.stop();" onMouseOut="this.start();">
<%
Dim dater
dater = FormatDatetime(date, vbshortdate)
Set oConnA=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
oConnA.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};" & "DBQ=c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\db1.mdb;"
SQLA="select ID, Title, News, URL, Date from News WHERE Date = #"&dater&"# ORDER BY ID ASC"
set inTableA = oConnA.execute(SQLA)
if inTableA.eof then
      response.write "No News Today"
else
while not inTableA.eof
response.write "("
response.write inTableA.fields("ID")
response.write ") "
response.write "<b>"
response.write inTableA.fields("Title")
response.write "</b> - "
response.write inTableA.fields("News")
response.write "... <a href="" "
response.write inTableA.fields("URL")
response.write """>[Read More]</a> "
response.write " "
response.write " "
response.write " "
inTableA.movenext
wend
end if
%>
</marquee>
</div>
</body>
</html>

you will need to set up your db as follows:

TableName: News

FieldName | Type
--------------------------------------------
ID | Number
Title | Text
News | Memo
URL | Text
Date | Date/Time [Short Date Format]

Just to show you all what I'm working with

flow79

ASKER

alright - well - thanks to all who commented. Def good to get some opinions and such. I will be splitting the points among all who commented. Have a great day!