CSS marquee-play-count

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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-play-count property is used for specifying the number of iterations - or loops - that a marquee performs before it stops playing.

For example, you could make the marquee run once, twice, three times, or as many as you like. You can also specify infinite, which makes it run forever (or until the user agent/browser stops it).

The marquee-play-count property works in conjunction with the overflow, overflow-style, marquee-direction, 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-play-count property specifies how many iterations the marquee should play before stopping.

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.

<integer>: Specifies the number of times the marquee should run before stopping. Must be a postive integer (negatives are not permitted).
infinite: Specifies that the marquee should run indefinitely (it should not stop).

Note that according to the CSS3 specification, the user agent/browser can stop a marquee after 16 loops - even if the specified value is indefinite or greater than 16.

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: 1
Applies To: Non-replaced block-level elements and non-replaced 'inline-block' elements
Inherited?: No
Media: Visual

Example Code

Vendor Prefixes

For maximum browser compatibility many web developers add browser-specific properties by using extensions such as -webkit- for Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera (newer versions), -ms- for Internet Explorer, -moz- for Firefox, -o- for older versions of Opera etc. As with any CSS property, if a browser doesn't support a proprietary extension, it will simply ignore it.

This practice is not recommended by the W3C, however in many cases, the only way you can test a property is to include the CSS extension that is compatible with your browser.

The major browser manufacturers generally strive to adhere to the W3C specifications, and when they support a non-prefixed property, they typically remove the prefixed version. Also, W3C advises vendors to remove their prefixes for properties that reach Candidate Recommendation status.

Many developers use Autoprefixer, which is a postprocessor for CSS. Autoprefixer automatically adds vendor prefixes to your CSS so that you don't need to. It also removes old, unnecessary prefixes from your CSS.

You can also use Autoprefixer with preprocessors such as Less and Sass.