Advice needed on Select Box option display...

[June Moore]

Hi,
I have a select box that has a fixed width. The fixed width is used to
ensure that the select box does not appear distorted on the form.

When the user selects an option, how do I show a tip for any titles
that are longer than the width of the select box, e.g. "Harry Potter
and the Prisoner of Azkaban"? If this is not possible, can anyone here
suggest ways that can make the longer titles visible to the user when
the select box is opened?

<select size="1" name="title_select" style="width=170px">
<option value="">Please select a film title</option>
<option value="A1">Ray</option>
<option value="A2">Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban</option>
<option value="A3">The Aviator</option>
<option value="A4">Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets</option>
<option value="A5">Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</option>
</select>

Thanks,
June.

[Paul R]

Can't be done. HTML 4.01 specifies that onmouseover can appear on an
OPTION tag (letting you work out which list item is highlighted), but
Internet Explorer 6.0 doesn't support it. Firefox and, I guess, a few
others do. In Firefox it looks OK anyway, because the dropdown portion
of the list is the appropriate width.

The Microsoft solution seems to be buy a bigger monitor or choose a
smaller font size. Unless you want to use some DIVs, some CSS and some
script to create something that looks and behaves like a list - but I
wouldn't necessarily recommend that!

[Spats30]

You could do a fake wrap of your optioins.

First put a seperator option between every title:

<option value="">-----------------------</option>

then just split your long descriptions onto two or more lines.

<option value="A2">Harry Potter and the</option>

<option value="A2">Prisoner of Azkaban</option>

<option value="">-----------------------</option>

That's one way to try it.