Creating Cross Browser Scrollers Using DHTML

Introduction

There's something about text moving across the screen that fascinates people. Since it was first possible to create moving text in a webpage, by using JavaScript, countless so-called scroller scripts have been created. Have you noticed, however, that most of them are limited to scrolling the text either inside a textbox, or status bar? For example, the below scroller scrolls text inside a textbox:

Not that there's anything wrong with textboxes or the status bar, but personally, I like my text scrolled all by itself, not wrapped inside any other element. In other words, a "true" text scroller. Is it possible? Apparently, yes. After a couple of weeks of searching, I finally found some working scrolling text examples on the web, and in the process, learned for myself how to create them. In this article, I wish to share that knowledge with you.

I'm going to teach you how to create a basic, side-scrolling scroller using the DHTML features of IE4+ and NS4+. Here's a demo:

Whether you're using IE4 or NS4, the scroller works equally. Two completely different concepts is involved in the realization of it. Let's see for ourselves how to create a text scroller!

Scrolling the text in IE4

In IE4, it's actually very simple to scroll any text, thanks to a default tag supported since IE3- the tag. Just wrap any text you want to scroll inside it, and off it goes:

This is scrolling text

In IE4, however, it seems you can now also put in HTML tags, and they will interpreted as such:

This is a BIG scrolling text

So that's that for IE4. If you're only creating a text scroller for IE4, you already know all there is to know. However, I, like many other people, use NS4 to browse the web, so whatever you have planned for IE4 users, I would appreciate seeing it as well. Let's move on to see how to make the scroller work in NS4 equally, which is a little more complex.

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» Level Intermediate

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