Admittedly, at one level this is of incredibly limited value. It's undoubtably dated, and there's a certain level of retro tackiness/kitsch there. And you could call it a monument to my ongoing insomnia.

Nonetheless, it's one of those things that's bothered me for a long time -- probably because I had a client that continued to provision a really awful JavaScript scrolling marquee across multiple sites that used to put my teeth on edge. And someone asked if this could be done.

The solution? Another sleepless night and a couple of beers later, I've ripped apart the source for the gallery I built and the Flash Scrolling Marquee, complete with XML control, embedded fonts, soft tweening, transparency and the ability to have clickable URLs is born. Bwaaaahahahaaaa!

Their solution to my solution? They didn't want it.

My solution to their solution to my solution? You get it for free. And it's worth everything you paid for it.



I'll not bore you terribly with all the ins and outs of how this is done; it's actually pretty straightforward and the code is rather annotated. But there are some...

• This is XML -- so if you're going to encode URLs, for example, you've got to do it the hard way with entities. [See the source for an example.]
• Remember to encode the URL for your XML source properly. This SWF, for example, is located in the directory 'img_code', as is the XML doc. But because the SWF is embedded in a document in the directory above, it has to be pointed to as 'img_code/more_code_flash_marquee.xml', not as 'more_code_flash_marquee.xml'.
• Did that last one have enough acronyms?
• This version only has two variables -- the text itself and the time in milliseconds. One of these days, I'll get around to making the tween a variable, I promise.
• The fonts are embedded in the file in the symbol 'textbox', found empty on the stage as 'textclip'.
• This version is multiline -- but encode your own breaks.
• Wiring this to PHP so you can put the data in MySQL is easy enough -- but I'll cover that somewhere else.