These tricks will help you achieve designs without resorting to the use of images, CSS3 gradient or extraneous markup. By collapsing boxes with zero line-height and height values, we can display content outside of the content box, over borders.

Bi-color background

This example does not include IE 6/7 workarounds (check the source code of this demo page for IE fixes).

.parent {
  display:inline-block;
  text-align: center;
  border: 1px solid #cecece;
}
.child {
  display:inline-block;
  line-height: 0;
  height: 0;
  border-top: 1em solid #ffc;
  border-bottom: 1em solid #fdcf46;
  padding:0 .6em;
  vertical-align:bottom;
}

<ul id="menuBar-A">
<li><a href="#">About Us</a></li>
<li class="selected"><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Products</a></li>
</ul>

Dots and pipes between list items

This example shows properly across browsers after some simple IE fixes.

ul.one,
ul.two {
    margin-left:0;
    display:inline-block;
    *display:inline;
    zoom:1;
    height:12px;
    line-height:12px;
    padding:0;
}

li {
    float:left;
    display:inline;
    height:2px;
    line-height:2px;
    position:relative;
    top:.3em;
}

ul.two {border-left:1px solid #333;}

ul.one li {border-left:2px solid #333;}

ul.two li {border-right:2px solid #333;}

ul.one li.first-child,
ul.two li.last-child {
    border:0;
}

a {
    color:#000;
    padding:.4em .9em;
    *position:relative;
}

<div id="menuBar-B">
<ul class="us">
<li><a href="#">About Us</a></li>
<li class="selected"><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
<ul class="ourOffer">
<li class="services"><a href="#">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Products</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Left and right-pointing triangles

This example does not include IE 6/7 workarounds (check the source code of this demo page for IE fixes).

#box {
  line-height: 0;
  height: 0;
  border: .4em solid transparent;
  border-left-color: #333;
  border-right-color: #333;
  padding: 0 .3em;
  display: inline-block;
}

<ul id="menuBar-C">
<li><a href="#">About Us</a></li>
<li class="selected"><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Services</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Products</a></li>
</ul>

IE 6 and border transparency

IE 6 does not support the keyword "transparent" for border color. When you use this value, IE 6 draws a black border.

The fix for this is to use the chroma filter which displays a specific color of the content of the object as transparent. For example, to create a right pointing arrow you could use this rule:

#Box {
  height: 0; 
  width: 0;
  border: 10px solid transparent;
  font-size: 0;
  _border-color: pink;
  _filter: chroma(color="pink"); 
  border-left-color: #333;
}

The font-size declaration is another workaround for IE 6. It is to make sure this browser does not increase the height of the box.

Stop the presses! I just learned a new trick (thank you Chungho Fang):

The magic [to create border transparency in IE] is to set ‘border-style’ to either dashed or dotted

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That's it! This is just one more way to use borders to achieve image-less design.

Further reading

• A Study of Regular Polygons
• slantastic
• Slants

About the author: Thierry Koblentz is a front-end engineer at Yahoo!
He owns TJK Design, ez-css.org and css-101.org. You can follow Thierry on Twitter at @thierrykoblentz .