A CSS 2 technique for decorating fluid HTML elements (blocks of unknown dimensions).

Adding decorations to fluid HTML elements (blocks that don't have fixed dimensions) is surprisingly very hard to do in CSS 2.1. The situation is much better in CSS 3 with the Backgrounds and Borders module. But if you want to support the currently deployed versions of Internet Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8 account for 60% of all web traffic as of June 2010), you're stuck with CSS 2.1 and a difficult task. This article explains why decorating fluid elements is hard, and demonstrates a technique to achieve such a goal. No JavaScript hacks here; only pure W3C compliant CSS and HTML, with some images.