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Marquee element

HTML element for scrolling text

  • 5 min read
  • 4 chapters

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Usability problems

Marquee can be distracting because the human eye is attracted to movement, and marquee text is constantly moving.

As with the blink element, 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 allows marquees to be programmed to stop when the mouse is over them.

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