Question

This is what I tried (see here):

body {
    overflow: hidden;
}

span {
    border: solid 2px blue;
    white-space: nowrap;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

Essentially, I want the span to shrink with ellipsis when the window is made small. What did I do wrong?

Answer 1

You need to have CSS overflow, width (or max-width), display, and white-space.

http://jsfiddle.net/HerrSerker/kaJ3L/1/

span {
    border: solid 2px blue;
    white-space: nowrap;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
    width: 100px;
    display: block;
    overflow: hidden
}

body {
    overflow: hidden;
}

span {
    border: solid 2px blue;
    white-space: nowrap;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
    width: 100px;
    display: block;
    overflow: hidden
}

<span>Test test test test test test</span>

---

Addendum
If you want an overview of techniques to do line clamping (Multiline Overflow Ellipses), look at this CSS-Tricks page: https://css-tricks.com/line-clampin/

Addendum2 (May 2019)
As this link claims, Firefox 68 will support -webkit-line-clamp (!)