Electromagnetic probes promise to be direct messengers of (spectral
properties of) hot and dense matter formed in heavy-ion collisions, even at
soft momentum transfers essential for characterizing possible phase
transitions. We examine how far we have progressed toward this goal by
highlighting recent developments, and trying to establish connections between
lattice QCD, effective hadronic models and phenomenology of dilepton
production.Comment: 8 pages latex incl. 12 ps/eps files; invited plenary talk at Quark
Matter 2006 conference, Shanghai (China), Nov. 14-20, 200