Creating an "Body Border" with CSS

hicksdesign has been " fiddling " with their site design. the new design features what someone called in the comments a "body border". it's basically a stroke of color just inside the entire viewable area, all the way around, in the browser window. i thought it was a nice touch and a pretty spiffy little css trick so i thought i'd feature how it was done here.

check out the example page .

the code

four unique page elements are neccecery. div's work fine for this:

<div id="left"></div>
<div id="right"></div>
<div id="top"></div>
<div id="bottom"></div>

here is the css for them. notice how clean the css can be. some properties are shared by all of the elements, some by only the top/bottom and left/right, and some unique to themselves. this css is coded like that, instead of repeating properties and values unnecessarily.

#top, #bottom, #left, #right {
	background: #a5ebff;
	position: fixed;
	}
	#left, #right {
		top: 0; bottom: 0;
		width: 15px;
		}
		#left { left: 0; }
		#right { right: 0; }
		
	#top, #bottom {
		left: 0; right: 0;
		height: 15px;
		}
		#top { top: 0; }
		#bottom { bottom: 0; }

browser compatibility

works great in firefox, safari, and opera, and ie 7. does it work in ie 6 (or below)? of course not! mostly has to do with positioning. ie 6 doesn't love fixed positioning and the hacks i find ugly and not terribly reliable. the solution is just to ditch the body border for ie:

header html for conditional stylesheet (put comment tags around this in use):

[if lte ie 6]>
    <link href="/ie6.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" />
<![endif]

css to remove body border:

#top, #bottom, #left, #right { display: none; }

original article here .