A scroller is text which scrolls on the status bar of the browser. Take a look at your status bar to see my scroller. Scrollers are very popular with JavaScript authors (esp. newbies like ourselves) and equally unpopular with the rest of the Web community.

Programming the Scroller

First is the ability to write to the status bar using the window.status property like this:
window.status = "This will appear in the status bar"

The second is the setTimeout() function. This function takes two parameters. The first is a string specifying the JavaScript statement to be executed on triggering and the second is a number specifing time in milliseconds after which triggering occurs.

Our scroller is essentially a function which, on each invocation, moves the text on the scroll bar a little to the left and then calls setTimeout() to invoke itself after a small interval of time.

Here is the complete code for the scroller.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
    <!-- Start of scroller script
    var scrollCounter = 0;
    var scrollText    = "Any text here";
    var scrollDelay   = 70;
    var i = 0;
	
    while (i ++ < 140)
        scrollText = " " + scrollText;

    function Scroller()
    {
        window.status = scrollText.substring(scrollCounter++,
          scrollText.length);
        if (scrollCounter == scrollText.length)
            scrollCounter = 0;
        setTimeout("Scroller()", scrollDelay);
    }

    Scroller();
    // End of scroller script -->
</SCRIPT>

Getting the Scroller on your page