Re: CSS Futures

Grant, Melinda wrote:
>  
> Daniel Beardsmore said:
>> If you want an overflow mechanism for small screens, marquee 
>> is definitely not it.
> 
> Well, opinions abound. ;-) Mine is that it's one reasonable option.

How are marquees useful for anything? You spend too much time waiting to see 
the text you want. On a large screen it's not so bad, as you can read what's 
already there instantaneously and then wait for the rest to trudge by slower 
than a farm tractor.

But on a small screen, you're hosed -- you've got to wait an age for it to 
scroll back to the start so you can make sense out of it. Not much text will 
be visible at once.

It's a case of the wrong question. The whole Web doesn't fit on a small 
screen. It's ridiculous to try to shoehorn certain small parts of it in with 
a clumsy approach. What about the rest of the page? What is the threshold at 
  which text should be considered too long to fit in a marquee? What do you 
do with the rest of the page?

A page with sidebars up each side, tables of images with rigid column counts 
(that won't reflow to fit), and all manner of other twisted layouts require 
a complete rethink anyway. Dragging along a useless scrolling text mode to 
patch up part of that isn't going to help.

Personally I've wondered if we could have a page split into sections that 
you can switch from a bar at the top of the window. The two sidebars and the 
main content area could be switched between, for example. Tables for grids 
where the row and column assignments are arbitrary (e.g. photo albums) need 
replacing with flowing grids like Andrew Fedoniouk's, James's or mine.

If you do want to use marquees, they need reinventing into something vaguely 
useful. Custom scroll speed for fast readers, they must not start scrolling 
until first made fully visible, and must be easily able to be reset to the 
start if you were reading something else when it was first scrolled into view.

A marquee as it stands is even more pathetic than a scrolling shop sign. The 
worst part is the extensive hang time -- the beginning of the text doesn't 
start to appear until the trailing end has finally gone. You should at least 
make it truly rolling -- as soon as you reach the last characters, start 
showing the start of the text immediately afterwards:

  THE END
  HE END -
  E END -
   END - T
  END - TH
  ND - THE
  D - THE
  ...
  HE START

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 20:25:55 UTC