..displaying it on the status bar via the onchange event. As far as I can tell, the option tags don't support any sort of event handling (like onmouseover) and the event handling within the containing select tag doesn't provide a mechanism to register which option is being hovered over (short of having to do a bunch of finagling with line spacing and mapping the device coordinates...).

Allowing the width to slide is not really an option either since these strings can get excessively long and also the bounce when dynamically taking strings in and out is disconcerting. What I'd really like is to have a word wrap attribute on the option tag so that an option could be displayed over more than one line.

Did I mention that the option tag is basically brain dead? Even worse is the optgroup tag. So how do you allocate new optgroups on the fly? Or if you already have an optgroup, how does the javascript put an new option in the group if there are no current options within the group? The tag seems to have been thrown in and abandoned as far as support goes.