HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

B.114. text-overflow

This nonstandard property, supported by Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, lets you handle text that is clipped by the width of an element more elegantly. The portion of the string that would normally overflow the edge of the box is replaced with an ellipsis (…).

The element must have its overflow property set to something other than visible (although hidden is the only value that really makes sense) for this property to have any effect.

Note that this property affects only text that is clipped by the width of the element (or the height in vertical writing systems), either because word-wrapping is disabled with the white-space property, or because a long word or other non-wrappable text segment is too long to fit in the box. ...