CSS marquee-direction

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Important: Since writing this article, the marquee module has been dropped from the CSS3 specification. The W3C suggests using CSS animations instead.

Therefore, do not use any of the marquee properties listed on this page. Instead, check out these CSS Marquee codes and examples (which are standards-compliant).

The CSS marquee-direction property is used for specifying the direction of a marquee.

The marquee-direction property works in conjunction with the overflow, overflow-style, marquee-play-count, marquee-speed, and marquee-style properties.

What is a Marquee?

A marquee is an effect where the content within an HTML element moves - or "scrolls" - (either horizontally or vertically) so that eventually, all content has been displayed at least once. The content can keep scrolling or it can stop after a certain number of times. It can slide in and stop. It can bounce back and forth - either once or a pre-determined number of times.

How Do Marquees Work in CSS?

In CSS3, marquees work like this:

If the contents of an element are too large to fit inside the element, it is said to "overflow". The overflow property can be used to hide the parts that don't fit inside the box. Now the overflow-style property can be used to specify that a marquee should be used to display the content (a marquee-line for horizontally scrolling marquees and marquee-block for vertically scrolling marquees). The marquee-direction property specifies the direction that the marquee should run in.

Note that at the time of writing, browser support for CSS3 marquees is limited. Also, marquees have since been dropped from the CSS3 specification. Therefore, the examples on this page may not work as expected.

Syntax

Possible Values

The value can be one of the following.

forward
Specifies that the marquee should in a forward direction.
reverse
Specifies that the marquee should run in the reverse direction.

Note that the actual direction that the marquee runs will depend on the value of the overflow-style and direction properties that have been applied to the element.

overflow-style direction forward reverse
marquee-line ltr left right
rtl right left
marquee-block   up down

In addition, all CSS properties also accept the following CSS-wide keyword values as the sole component of their property value:

initial
Represents the value specified as the property's initial value.
inherit
Represents the computed value of the property on the element's parent.
unset
This value acts as either inherit or initial, depending on whether the property is inherited or not. In other words, it sets all properties to their parent value if they are inheritable or to their initial value if not inheritable.

Basic Property Information

Initial Value
forward
Applies To
Non-replaced block-level elements and non-replaced 'inline-block' elements
Inherited?
Yes
Media
Visual

Example Code

CSS Specifications

Browser Support

Browser support for CSS properties can vary, particularly for newer or experimental features. Check current browser compatibility before using a property in production, especially when supporting older browsers.

Initial Value

CSS properties have an initial value that applies when the property has not been explicitly set. The initial value is different from the value inherited from a parent element and may vary between properties.

Inheritance

Some CSS properties inherit their computed value from their parent element by default, while others do not. The inherit, initial, unset, and revert keywords can also be used to control how a property gets its value.

Vendor Prefixes

Most modern CSS properties use the standard, unprefixed syntax. Vendor-prefixed properties such as -webkit- are mainly relevant to older browser versions or specific features and should only be used when required by your browser support targets.