Vertical scrolling content at a width equivalent to 320 CSS pixels.So I was very pleased to see someone else flying the same flag.Ī recent article by Eric Eggert is quite critical of this property, since using it in web content can cause it to fail Success Criterion 1.4.10 Reflow:Ĭontent can be presented without loss of information or functionality, and without requiring scrolling in two dimensions for: I’m not a fan, and take every suitable opportunity to discourage people from using this property though I rarely get enthusiastic support on that point.
Worth asking whether losing that data is worth the cost of what that content is supposed to do before giving giving it a haircut.The CSS text-overflow property can be used to show a visual indication for text that’s been clipped by its container. But it might also be throwing the baby out with the bath water. text-overflow: ellipsis might be part of your CSS arsenal for that.
#CSS TEXT OVERFLOW ELLIPSIS HOW TO#
So maybe err on the side of writing defensive CSS… CSS that anticipates issues and knows how to gracefully handle different content scenarios.
#CSS TEXT OVERFLOW ELLIPSIS ARCHIVE#
Maybe an archive of blog posts where each post shows an excerpt of the post content before truncating, but that’s not exactly a use case for text-overflow: ellipse.ĬSS has the tools to make a flexible design that accounts for varying lengths of text. I have a hard time recalling any situation where the text on a page is unimportant or without purpose to the extent that I’d be cool cutting if off at any arbitrary point determined by a CSS property. But I’d probably argue, like Eric, that the design should adapt to the content rather than the other way around. That’s cool as long as you know what’s happening and it’s intended.īut here’s what Eric says that made me want to share this:ĭon’t constrain the content to fit your design, make your CSS flexible to handle longer words gracefully.Īgain, you might want to conform content to the design.
Once it’s gone, it’s gone ( although screen readers seem to announce it).
And if that text is simply not there, users will miss it, even if it is the best and most well-crafted call to action ever published to the web.Įric points out that there is no way to make the text truncated by text-overflow: ellipsis visible. Text that inadvertently overflows a container is lost in the sense that it’s simply not there. The ultimate goal is to prevent “losing” data, something that can certainly happen in CSS. Maybe only a few, but legitimate nonetheless. As Eric says, there are legitimate use cases for truncating text. I think “… if used in certain situations” belongs there, but it certainly makes for a better blog post title without it. But once you change the viewport or resize the text, the end of the text disappears. However, I often see it used on items like buttons or even form labels to make them look nicer(?) or when aligning them vertically. To preserve more space for the title, you constrain the description to one line on small viewports to the one-line and you repeat the description on the detail page for this item. For example, you might have a table with titles and descriptions. There are a few legitimate use cases for this technique.