HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

B.77. overflow

This property lets you control how the browser treats an element when it is not big enough to hold all its content. In practice, this occurs only when you have assigned a fixed or maximum width and/or height for the element. Most often, content will overflow the height of the element, because inline content will reflow to accommodate limited width; however, if an element contains children with their own fixed widths, they can overflow the width as well.

When you apply the overflow property to an element whose dimensions cause part of its contents to be cropped, the size of the element is cropped for layout purposes as well. Decorations such as borders are applied to the element after cropping has taken place. This is quite different ...