MARQUEE disabled by default; can be turned on via pref
L. David Baron
With the checkin of http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161109
earlier today, MARQUEE is now disabled by default, but can be enabled by
setting the pref "browser.display.enable_marquee" to true. Distributors
who want MARQUEE enabled should set this pref in their default
preferences file.
-David
--
L. David Baron <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
Esben Mose Hansen
> With the checkin of http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161109
> earlier today, MARQUEE is now disabled by default, but can be enabled by
> setting the pref "browser.display.enable_marquee" to true. Distributors
> who want MARQUEE enabled should set this pref in their default
> preferences file.
And there was much rejoycing :-D
regards, Esben
David Baron
>
> With the checkin of http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161109
> earlier today, MARQUEE is now disabled by default, but can be enabled by
> setting the pref "browser.display.enable_marquee" to true. Distributors
> who want MARQUEE enabled should set this pref in their default
> preferences file.
I backed out this checkin, so MARQUEE is now enabled by default again.
I may readd the preference as a user preference at some point in the
future, but with the default to on.
I originally wrote and checked in this (poorly designed) patch under
significant pressure (including threats from one person to leave the
Mozilla project), and was under the impression that very few others in
the Mozilla project agreed with my position. Since I checked it in I
have learned that a significant number of others agree with me. (In
other words, I no longer feel that there is a community consensus
against my position.)
The reasons I want marquee enabled by default are:
* Having forks in the code hurts testing and development.
* Having an implementation of marquee improves our compatibility with
the web, and we are a web browser.
My responses to some of the common arguments for disabling marquee are:
* Much of the opposition to marquee is related to marquee being
nonstandard, yet few people have objected to the many nonstandard
things we do because Netscape 4.x, and in some cases also MSIE for
Windows, do them. Nor do people object to all the tiny details of
layout that we imitate despite that they are not described in any
standard (a practice that is far worse for the web, since it lets web
authors write pages that respond poorly to different font sizes,
screen sizes, and devices).
* From an accessibility perspective, marquee is not nearly as bad as
the equivalent script (and especially so in cases where the content,
as it often is, is contained in the script rather than the document).
(I think this is why declarative animation is preferred within the
W3C over script-based animation. See SMIL Animation [1].)
Marquee can currently be disabled by users by adding the following rule
to userContent.css (in the chrome subdirectory of the profile
directory):
marquee { -moz-binding: none; }
-David
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/smil-animation/
David Baron
> earlier today, MARQUEE is now disabled by default, but can be enabled by
> setting the pref "browser.display.enable_marquee" to true. Distributors
> who want MARQUEE enabled should set this pref in their default
> preferences file.
I backed out this checkin, so MARQUEE is now enabled by default again.
marquee { -moz-binding: none; }
-David
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/smil-animation/
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