It's just a cosmetic feature, so you can use it already. Older browsers won't show the ellipsis in that case but who cares. Graceful fallback is automatic.

I've been maintaining a jQuery plugin for the text-overflow property for a while. It works well in most cases: http://www.bramstein.com/projects/text-overflow/

You can see a test page here, which only works in Firefox due to the feature detection: http://www.bramstein.com/projects/text-overflow/examples.htm...

If everyone had that attitude, we'd still be stuck at HTML 3.2... Yes, it needs time to catch up, sure, but in a few years it will be useful to have.