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.