Creating Cross Browser Scrollers Using DHTML - Page 2

Scrolling In NS4

To scroll text in NS4, everything- including the interface- has to be created from scratch. That's because no default tag or feature exists in NS4 to simulate this action.

What does exist in NS4, though, is the tag (the DHTML tag of the browser). This tag allows you to move whatever is inside of it freely around the page, and by applying some control, we can mold that into a scroller!

Here's the basic idea. We define a tag and put the text to scroll inside of it. We then wrap all of that with the tag, which simply grounds it to appear inline with the rest of the page (as opposed to the coordinates defined by the layer's left and top position).

This is scrolling text. This is scrolling text. This is scrolling text...

Then, by using a simple script to increment the left position of this layer, it moves, just like in a scroller. Before I show you the script itself, allow me to illustrate what I've just talked about graphically:

The tag defines the "scroller window", the physical viewable area of the scroller (green rectangle). The tag, on the other hand, defines/contains the scrolling text itself, and is represented above as the white rectangle. We want to create a script that will move this white rectangle continuously to the left until it reaches the end of the text, then start over again.