I have a GWT application that has a left-hand scrollable navigation panel with a directory tree. I would like to be able to keep the panel narrow with a scroll bar at the bottom (which I have) but show the entire file name on hover, overflowing over the vertical scrollbar and into the next panel. I could do it by overlaying a small div with the full name when hovering, but that seems klugey and prone to subtle visual errors. I've tried fiddling with visibility, wrap and z-index with no effect. Can I do this by just adjusting the CSS parameters of the item in question, or on some other not-so-klugey way?

IntelliJ does this in the right way, but they're not in a browser:

Thanks, -Lars

I think you'll have to go with an overlay. If the labels are inside a div then that div will control the overflow, and there's no way to specify different overflow values for different children.

You could copy all of the styles from your label onto your new overlay div at runtime to avoid having to duplicate all your styling. I'd probably give up on having the outline box only around the overflow (around "esponse" in your example picture). That seems hard.