The Overflow Property

As discussed earlier, every element on the page is a box. If the height of the box is not set, the height of that box will grow as large as necessary to accomodate the content.

This text is inside the div element, which has a blue background-color and is floated to the left. We set a specific height and width for the div element, and as you can see, the content cannot fit.

The CSS overflow property specifies the behavior that occurs when an element's content overflows the element's box.











The overflow Property Values

There are four values for the overflow property: visible (the default value), scroll, hidden and auto.

The value scroll results in clipped overflow, but a scrollbar is added, so the rest of the content may be seen.

This text is inside the div element, which has a blue background-color and is floated to the left. We set a specific height and width for the div element, and as you can see, the content is seen by scrolling.
The code above will produce both horizontal and vertical scrollbars.







auto and hidden

auto - If overflow is clipped, a scroll-bar shoud be added to make it possible to see the rest of the content.

hidden - The overflow is clipped, and the rest of the content will be invisible.

This text is inside the div element, which has a blue background-color and is floated to the left. We set a specific height and width for the div element, and as you can see, the content is occluded.
The default value for the overflow property is visible