The marquee object reflects the marquee element.

This is single character key that either gives focus to an element (in some browsers) or activates a form control or link action. The browser and operating system determine if the user must press a modifier key (e.g., Ctrl, Alt, or Command) with the access key to activate the link. In Windows versions of IE 5 and later and Netscape 6, the Alt key is required and the key is not case-sensitive. For Macintosh versions of IE 5 and later and Netscape 6, the Ctrl modifier key is required to effect the action.

Specifies the motion of the content within the rectangular space set aside for the marquee element. You have a choice of three motion types.

Background color of the element. This color setting is not reflected in the style sheet backgroundColor property. Even if the bgcolor attribute or bgColor property is set with a plain-language color name, the returned value is always a hexadecimal triplet.

Removes focus from the current object, at which time the object's onblur event fires. Note that the range of elements capable of focus and blur (both the event and method) is limited in all browsers except for more recent versions of IE (see the shared tabindex attribute in Chapter 8). Most reliably for backward compatibility, apply the blur( ) method to blatantly focusable elements, such as text input and textarea elements. Assigning the attribute onfocus="this.blur( );" to a text input element, for instance, is a crude but effective backward-compatible way to largely disable a field for browsers that do not provide genuine element disabling.

Broadly speaking, these provide the height and width of the element's content, but with minor variations with respect to element padding among various operating system versions of IE and compatibility modes controlled by the DOCTYPE declaration. Not available for all element types in IE for Macintosh. For Netscape 7, values are zero except when an element's content overflows the viewable area, in which case the values reveal the dimensions of the viewable area (e.g., the browser window's content region for the document.body element). See the Section 9.2 at the beginning of this chapter for details.

Broadly speaking, these provide the left and top coordinates of the element's content within the box that includes the element's padding, but with minor variations among various operating system versions of IE. Not available for all element types in IE for Macintosh. See the Section 9.2 at the beginning of this chapter for details. More useful information for inline element positioning generally comes from the offsetLeft and offsetTop properties (including Netscape 6). For CSS-positioned elements (including changing an element's position), use style object properties, such as left and top, and (in IE only) pixelLeft and pixelTop.

Used with IE data binding to associate a remote data source column name with the content of the marquee element. A datasrc attribute must also be set for the element. Setting both the dataFld and dataSrc properties to empty strings breaks the binding between element and data source. Works only with text file data sources in IE 5/Mac.

Used with IE data binding, this property advises the browser whether the source material arriving from the data source is to be treated as plain text or as tagged HTML.

Used with IE data binding to specify the ID of the page's object element that loads the data source object for remote data access. Setting both the dataFld and dataSrc properties to empty strings breaks the binding between element and data source. Works only with text file data sources in IE 5/Mac.

Specifies the direction of the scroll within the element space.

Gives focus from the current object, at which time the object's onfocus event fires. Note that the range of elements capable of focus and blur (both the event and method) is limited in all browsers except for more recent versions of IE (see the shared tabindex attribute in Chapter 8). Most reliably for backward compatibility, apply the focus( ) method to blatantly focusable elements, such as text input and textarea elements.

Provide the height and width in pixels of the element. Changes to these values are immediately reflected in reflowed content on the page.

Provide the pixel measure of horizontal and vertical margins surrounding the element. The hspace property affects the left and right edges of the element equally; the vspace affects the top and bottom edges of the element equally. These margins are not the same as margins set by style sheets, but they have the same visual effect.

Sets the number of times the element scrolls its content. After the final scroll, the content remains in a fixed position. Constant animation can sometimes be distracting to page visitors, so if you have the marquee turn itself off after a few scrolls, you may be doing your visitors a favor.

Used with IE data binding, returns an integer representing the record within the data set that generated the element (i.e., an element whose content is filled via data binding). Values of this property can be used to extract a specific record from an Active Data Objects (ADO) record set (see recordset property). Although this property is defined for all IE element objects, the other properties related to data binding belong to a subset of elements.

Specifies the amount of space between positions of each drawing of the content. The greater the space, the faster the text appears to scroll. See also scrollDelay.

Specifies the amount of time in milliseconds between each drawing of the content. The greater the delay, the slower the text appears to scroll. See also scrollAmount.

Originally implemented in IE 4 for elements that either scrolled or influenced an element's scroll (body, button, caption, div, fieldset, legend, marquee, and textarea), these properties return the pixel dimensions of an element, including elements that are larger than the viewable area in the browser window. This is in contrast to the clientHeight and clientWidth properties for scrollable elements, which return dimensions of only visible portions of the element. IE for the Macintosh, however, interprets the intent of the scroll- properties differently, returning the dimensions of the visible portion.

Provide the distance in pixels between the actual left or top edge of the element's physical content and the left or top edge of the visible portion of the content. Setting these properties allows you to use a script to adjust the scrolling of content within a scrollable container, such as text in a textarea element or an entire document in the browser window or frame. When the content is not scrolled, both values are zero. Setting the scrollTop property to 15 scrolls the document upward by 15 pixels in the window; the scrollLeft property is unaffected unless explicitly changed. The property values change as the user adjusts the scrollbars. This is important for some event-driven positioning tasks in IE for Windows because the coordinate system for event offset measurements are with respect to the visible area of a page in the browser window. You must add document.body scrolling factors to align event coordinates with body content positions (see the element dragging example in Chapter 6). Starting with IE 5 for Windows, the scrollLeft and scrollTop properties are available for all HTML element objects, but values for unscrollable elements are zero.

This is a number that indicates the sequence of this element within the tabbing order of all focusable elements in the document. Tabbing order follows a strict set of rules. Elements that have values other than zero assigned to their tabIndex properties are first in line when a user starts tabbing in a page. Focus starts with the element with the lowest tabIndex value and proceeds in order to the highest value, regardless of physical location on the page or in the document. If two elements have the same tabIndex values, the element that comes earlier in the document receives focus first. Next come all elements that either don't support the tabIndex property or have the value set to zero. These elements receive focus in the order in which they appear in the document.

Specifies whether the browser should honor scrolldelay attribute settings below 60 milliseconds. The default setting (false) prevents accidental settings that scroll too fast for most readers.

See hspace.

See height.

Starts the marquee element scrolling if it has been stopped. If the method is invoked on a stopped element, the onstart event handler also fires in response.

Stops the scrolling of the marquee element. The content remains on the screen in the precise position it was in when the method was invoked. Restart via the start( ) method.