There are a couple of official use instances for this method. For instance, you might need a desk with titles and descriptions. To protect more room for the title, you constrain the outline to 1 line on small viewports to the one-line and also you repeat the outline on the element web page for this merchandise.
Nevertheless, I typically see it used on objects like buttons and even type labels to make them look nicer(?) or when aligning them vertically. However as soon as you modify the viewport or resize the textual content, the tip of the textual content disappears.
I believe “… if utilized in sure conditions” belongs there, but it surely definitely makes for a greater weblog submit title with out it. As Eric says, there are official use instances for truncating textual content. Possibly just a few, however official nonetheless.
The last word aim is to forestall “shedding” knowledge, one thing that may definitely occur in CSS. Textual content that inadvertently overflows a container is misplaced within the sense that it’s merely not there. And if that textual content is just not there, customers will miss it, even when it’s the greatest and most well-crafted name to motion ever revealed to the online.
Eric factors out that there isn’t any method to make the textual content truncated by text-overflow: ellipsis seen. As soon as it’s gone, it’s gone (though display readers appear to announce it). It’s virtually misplaced knowledge. You may be OK with that. That’s cool so long as you already know what’s taking place and it’s supposed.
However right here’s what Eric says that made me wish to share this:
Don’t constrain the content material to suit your design, make your CSS versatile to deal with longer phrases gracefully.
Once more, you may wish to conform content material to the design. However I’d most likely argue, like Eric, that the design ought to adapt to the content material quite than the opposite approach round. I’ve a tough time recalling any scenario the place the textual content on a web page is unimportant or with out function to the extent that I’d be cool slicing if off at any arbitrary level decided by a CSS property. Possibly an archive of weblog posts the place every submit exhibits an excerpt of the submit content material earlier than truncating, however that’s not precisely a use case for text-overflow: ellipse.
CSS has the instruments to make a versatile design that accounts for various lengths of textual content. So possibly err on the facet of writing defensive CSS… CSS that anticipates points and is aware of how one can gracefully deal with totally different content material situations. text-overflow: ellipsis may be a part of your CSS arsenal for that. But it surely may also be throwing the newborn out with the tub water. Value asking whether or not shedding that knowledge is price the price of what that content material is meant to do earlier than giving giving it a haircut.
Whereas we’re speaking about truncating textual content…
