Created attachment 97950 [details] reproduces problem See test case. If I have span New Zealand and I am cutting off from w onwards and inserting an ellipsis, I would not expect background colours from the cut off text to be applied to the parent span. It appears broken in IE and Chrome and I will be raising a question on the mozilla text overflow bug.
(In reply to comment #0) > I will be raising a question on the mozilla text overflow bug. That would be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312156#c305 ;-)
As pointed out on the mozilla bug, it seems this is what is specified to happen "(In reply to comment #305) "Hide characters and atomic inline-level elements at the end edge of the line as necessary to fit the ellipsis." http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-ui/#text-overflow In your example, the red background belongs to a non-atomic inline, which is still displayed even though its text is removed. I don't see any error in IE9 or Chrome13 for your testcase, this is how Firefox will render it as well."