Handling really wide selects

By default, select tags expand to the width of their widest option. This becomes a problem if the options become very long. Using CSS limiting that width is fairly easy, but then the text is truncated. Word-wraping options works in Netscape (I'm actually using Mozilla 1.2.1 on Windows), but I can't find any way to make IE (at least IE6 on Windows) wrap the text.

Other ideas I've thought of is truncating the text and using tool-tips (both through the title tag and via various DHTML stuff) on the option tags to show the entire value, but they only work marginally well and again, only for Mozilla, since IE seems to ignore most style and event handling attributes for option tags.

Has anyone else solved this problem?

we've had some really smart guys tackle this and the result - reduce the display text. Sorry!

or, create your own select box type effect using dhtml

I've thought of making my own select, but it quickly becomes a huge pain since IE and Netscape (let alone other browsers) can't agree to handle anything relating to DHTML the same way - even between different versions or different platforms.

I've found a couple select box replacements:
http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/select/jsGenerated.html - only works on IE
http://kovaler.jinr.ru/library/www/...electlists.html - doesn't seem to work on newer browsers

Know of any others?

you can find cross compatible DHTML codes, however even that would only be compatible to an extent. i suppose the question is how compatible do you really want it to be? I'm sure ie4+ & nn4+ is possible, however ie4+ & nn6+ would be easier.

unless you want to use flash *hurl*