Christian Heilmann

Return of the dreaded DHTML news scroller

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 10:49 pm

help needed Apparently this thing is not as neat as I thought it was as it slows down Safari and Firefox on Mac enormously. As I don’t have the time to fix it right now (book writing), I invite you to have a go at it and clean it up. I will publish the fixed version with full credits here. I am not proud of this thing, I hate those scrollers.

Sometimes it is amazing how a bad idea from the past keeps popping up in different spots at the same time.
Some of you might remember when DHTML was at its prime, that every web site needed a news upscroller, marquee or other scroller. For some reason, clients love these things and many a developer started a script loaded with features and merrily mixing HTML, JavaScript and CSS to support even the most pitiful browsers out there. The DHTML Junkyards are still full of scripts hailing from that time.

This morning somebody on CSS-D asked for a table-less news upscroller in CSS, which of course is impossible, but just as I sighed and wondered who still wants those, one of our clients demanded one as well. Well, their development team agreed to implement one and wanted advice how to do one and still only use valid HTML and be accessible.

The accessibility of it is an issue, as are a lot of other things. However, I did an example and for the sake of it vented off some steam on the demo page.
Enjoy DOMnews, the DOM compliant, stop-able gracefully degrading DHTML news upscroller.

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