A Brief History of the <marquee> Tag

In 1995, a Microsoft engineer did something beautiful and terrible. They created the <marquee> tag — an HTML element that made text scroll horizontally across the screen.

It was never part of any official HTML specification. It was a proprietary extension, born of the browser wars era when Netscape and Internet Explorer competed by adding increasingly wild features to their browsers.

The Golden Age

For a brief, glorious period, every personal homepage featured scrolling text. "Welcome to my website!" would glide across the screen like a news ticker from the future. Guest books invited visitors to sign in. Under-construction GIFs promised that the best was yet to come.

The <marquee> tag supported several attributes:

• direction — left, right, up, or down
• behavior — scroll, slide, or alternate (bounce!)
• scrollamount — how fast it moved
• loop — how many times it repeated

You could nest marquees inside marquees. You could put images in marquees. You could, and people did, put entire pages in marquees.

The Decline

Web standards advocates were not impressed. The <marquee> tag was deprecated, then obsolete. CSS animations replaced it with more control and better performance. The scrolling text of the early web was replaced by smooth, tasteful animations that conveyed professionalism.

But something was lost. The marquee wasn't just an animation — it was an attitude. It said: "I made a website and I am excited about it."

Legacy

The <marquee> tag still works in most browsers today, decades after its deprecation. Browsers are remarkably backwards-compatible that way. You can still write <marquee>Hello!</marquee> and watch your text glide across the screen.

There's a lesson in that persistence. The web remembers everything. Even the weird parts. Especially the weird parts.