The scrollWidth property is read-only, allowing you to obtain the width actually needed in the scrolling. Even though the width of this DIV is 200, the width inside the scrolling text box might be less, since the wrapping of the text could mean that the entire width of the object is not used. This dimension can be useful for a variety of reasons; for example, the width of the DIV could be set to the scrollWidth to conserve horizontal space while respecting the set width as a maximum.