On a related note, one of my coding side-projects is a web music player. And I had the problem that fitting the song, album and artist names into a layout is tricky, because they can be very long.
And yeah, then I realized that <marquee/> is actually a valid solution for that. Lots of music players do use a marquee-style display, when the length exceeds the available space.
Alas, it still isn’t actually a good solution. Marquees make sense as signs, but not for an interactive UI. It’s pretty much always a better UX, when you just make it horizontally scrollable, so that the user can read the start and scroll, if they want to read the rest.
I’m more fond of “String that is too…” being displayed in the UI and then a tooltip with the full string being displayed when you mouse over the string in the UI.
Or winamp had a marquee that you could click and scroll manually, I liked that method too.
Well, as was already said, tooltips don’t work on mobile, at least not unless you write custom code.
And I’ve seen concepts for various marquee solutions, which attempted to fix the problem of the text start not always being readable, by e.g. only making the marquee scroll once after you click on it.
If you enjoy these marquee solutions, then more power to you, but the need for custom code is what keeps me away again.
Just making it horizontally scrollable is a beautifully simple solution in comparison.
On a related note, one of my coding side-projects is a web music player. And I had the problem that fitting the song, album and artist names into a layout is tricky, because they can be very long.
And yeah, then I realized that
<marquee/>is actually a valid solution for that. Lots of music players do use a marquee-style display, when the length exceeds the available space.Alas, it still isn’t actually a good solution. Marquees make sense as signs, but not for an interactive UI. It’s pretty much always a better UX, when you just make it horizontally scrollable, so that the user can read the start and scroll, if they want to read the rest.
I’m more fond of “String that is too…” being displayed in the UI and then a tooltip with the full string being displayed when you mouse over the string in the UI.
Or winamp had a marquee that you could click and scroll manually, I liked that method too.
The tooltips are often a smaller font though, which is an issue for some (many?) of us
Also not so great for mobile
Well, as was already said, tooltips don’t work on mobile, at least not unless you write custom code.
And I’ve seen concepts for various marquee solutions, which attempted to fix the problem of the text start not always being readable, by e.g. only making the marquee scroll once after you click on it.
If you enjoy these marquee solutions, then more power to you, but the need for custom code is what keeps me away again.
Just making it horizontally scrollable is a beautifully simple solution in comparison.