Truncating long strings with CSS: feasible yet?

Is there any good way of truncating text with plain HTML and CSS, so that dynamic content can fit in a fixed-width-and-height layout?

I've been truncating server-side by logical width (i.e. a blindly-guessed number of characters), but since a 'w' is wider than an 'i' this tends to be suboptimal, and also requires me to re-guess (and keep tweaking) the number of characters for every fixed width. Ideally the truncation would happen in the browser, which knows the physical width of the rendered text.

I've found that IE has a text-overflow: ellipsis property that does exactly what I want, but I need this to be cross-browser. This property seems to be (somewhat?) standard but isn't supported by Firefox. I've found various workarounds based on overflow: hidden, but they either don't display an ellipsis (I want the user to know the content was truncated), or display it all the time (even if the content wasn't truncated).

Does anyone have a good way of fitting dynamic text in a fixed layout, or is server-side truncation by logical width as good as I'm going to get for now?

Update: text-overflow: ellipsis is now supported as of Firefox 7 (released September 27th 2011). Yay! My original answer follows as a historical record.

Justin Maxwell has cross browser CSS solution. It does come with the downside however of not allowing the text to be selected in Firefox. Check out his guest post on Matt Snider's blog for the full details on how this works.

Note this technique also prevents updating the content of the node in JavaScript using the innerHTML property in Firefox. See the end of this post for a workaround.

CSS

.ellipsis {
	white-space: nowrap;
	overflow: hidden;
	text-overflow: ellipsis;
	-o-text-overflow: ellipsis;
	-moz-binding: url('assets/xml/ellipsis.xml#ellipsis');
}

ellipsis.xml file contents

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<bindings
  xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/xbl"
  xmlns:xbl="http://www.mozilla.org/xbl"
  xmlns:xul="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
>
	<binding id="ellipsis">
		<content>
			<xul:window>
				<xul:description crop="end" xbl:inherits="value=xbl:text"><children/></xul:description>
			</xul:window>
		</content>
	</binding>
</bindings>

Updating node content

To update the content of a node in a way that works in Firefox use the following:

var replaceEllipsis(node, content) {
	node.innerHTML = content;
	// use your favorite framework to detect the gecko browser
	if (YAHOO.env.ua.gecko) {
		var pnode = node.parentNode,
			newNode = node.cloneNode(true);
		
		pnode.replaceChild(newNode, node);
	}
};

See Matt Snider's post for an explanation of how this works.

2014 March: Truncating long strings with CSS: a new answer with focus on browser support

Demo on http://jsbin.com/leyukama/1/ (I use jsbin because it supports old version of IE).

<style type="text/css">
    span {
		display: inline-block;
		white-space: nowrap;
		overflow: hidden;
		text-overflow: ellipsis;     /** IE6+, Firefox 7+, Opera 11+, Chrome, Safari **/
		-o-text-overflow: ellipsis;  /** Opera 9 & 10 **/
		width: 370px; /* note that this width will have to be smaller to see the effect */
    }
</style>

<span>Some very long text that should be cut off at some point coz it's a bit too long and the text overflow ellipsis feature is used</span>

The -ms-text-overflow CSS property is not necessary: it is a synonym of the text-overflow CSS property, but versions of IE from 6 to 11 already support the text-overflow CSS property.

Successfully tested (on Browserstack.com) on Windows OS, for web browsers:

• IE6 to IE11
• Opera 10.6, Opera 11.1, Opera 15.0, Opera 20.0
• Chrome 14, Chrome 20, Chrome 25
• Safari 4.0, Safari 5.0, Safari 5.1
• Firefox 7.0, Firefox 15

Firefox: as pointed out by Simon Lieschke (in another answer), Firefox only support the text-overflow CSS property from Firefox 7 onwards (released September 27th 2011).

I double checked this behavior on Firefox 3.0 & Firefox 6.0 (text-overflow is not supported).

Some further testing on a Mac OS web browsers would be needed.

Note: you may want to show a tooltip on mouse hover when an ellipsis is applied, this can be done via javascript, see this questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7738117/html-text-overflow-ellipsis-detection and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5474871/html-how-can-i-show-tooltip-only-when-ellipsis-is-activated

Resources:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-overflow#Browser_compatibility
• http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-ellipsis/
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/1101702/759452
• http://www.browsersupport.net/CSS/text-overflow
• http://caniuse.com/text-overflow
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms531174(v=vs.85).aspx
• http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/whats-new-for-web-developers-in-firefox-7/

If you're OK with a JavaScript solution, there's a jQuery plug-in to do this in a cross-browser fashion - see http://azgtech.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/text-overflow-ellipsis-for-firefox-via-jquery/

OK, Firefox 7 implemented text-overflow: ellipsis as well as text-overflow: "string". Final release is planned for 2011-09-27.

Another solution to the problem could be the following set of CSS rules:

.ellipsis{
 white-space:nowrap;
 overflow:hidden;
}

.ellipsis:after{
  content:'...';
}

The only drawback with the above CSS is that it would add the "..." irrespective of whether the text-overflows the container or not. Still, if you have a case where you have a bunch of elements and are sure that content will overflow, this one would be a simpler set of rules.

My two cents. Hats off to the original technique by Justin Maxwell