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Creating interlocking, irregular borders with CSS.

Answer 1

A:

What you're asking for is not possible in any cross-browser compatible way using CSS alone. You'd need to definitely use JavaScript for this.

Praveen Angyan 2009-07-09 20:57:34

-1 theres a multitude of ways to do this as illustrated by 3 answers (which seem to be going in the right direction). never say never...

Darko Z 2009-07-10 05:10:43

Answer 2

+3 A:

You can do this 1px borders and 1px overlapping of absolute positioned divs. have the smaller of the divs for a given intersect have no border, and make it overlap the border of the larger div.

Edit: Also, the smaller div should have a higher z-index so it rests on top.

Zack 2009-07-09 20:58:27

Probably wont be perfect but should work.

2009-07-09 21:00:40

Answer 3

A:

It's just a matter of playing a bit with borders, padding and relative positioning. See this example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt;
<html>
<head>
    <title>DIVs</title>
    <style type="text/css">
        body, html {
            background: #eee;
        }

        div.box {
            background: #fff;
            border-style: solid;
            border-width: 2px;
            position: relative;
            width: 100px;
            z-index: 1;
        }

        div.group {
            float: left;
        }

        #box-1, #box-4 {
            z-index: 2;
        }

        #box-1 {
            border-color: #f00;
            border-bottom: 0;
            border-right: 0;
            padding-right: 2px;
        }

        #box-2 {
            border-color: #f0f;
        }

        #box-3 {
            border-color: #0f0;
        }

        #box-4 {
            border-color: #00f;
            border-left: 0;
            border-top: 0;
            padding-left: 2px;
        }

        #group-2 {
            left: -2px;
            position: relative;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="group" id="group-1">
    <div class="box" id="box-1">one<br />one<br />one<br />one</div>
    <div class="box" id="box-2">two<br />two<br />two<br />two<br />two<br />
    two</div>
</div>
<div class="group" id="group-2">
    <div class="box" id="box-3">three<br />three<br />three<br />three<br />
    three<br />three</div>
    <div class="box" id="box-4">four<br />four<br />four</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Blixt 2009-07-09 21:21:14

Answer 4

+3 A:

Here's my solution. It uses floats with a negative margin and fakes the no-border part by setting the border to the background color of the div.

.w {width:223px;}
.box {float:left;height:100px;width:100px;border:1px solid #000;margin-bottom:10px;}
.tall {height: 300px;}
.wide {width:120px;}
.right {position:relative;z-index:1;float:right;margin-left:-1px;}
.no_rb {border-right:1px solid #fff;position:relative;z-index:10;}
.no_lb {border-left:1px solid #fff;position:relative;z-index:10;}

<div class="w">
    <div class="box wide no_rb"></div>
    <div class="box tall right"></div>
    <div class="box tall"></div>
    <div class="box right wide no_lb"></div>
</div>

Emily 2009-07-09 22:14:21

Answer 5

A:

Try this one out. Using floats, negative margins and z-index only.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
<html>
    <head>
     <title>Interlock test</title>
     <style>
         div { width:150px; border:1px solid #000; background:#fff; position:relative; margin-bottom:5px; float:left; }
         .container { width:309px; border:none; }
         .tallTop, .tallBottom { height:400px; z-index:1; }
         .tallTop { float:right; }
         .shortTop, .shortBottom { height:200px; z-index:2; width:157px; }
         .shortTop { margin-right:-1px; border-right:none; }
         .shortBottom { margin-left:-1px; border-left:none; float:right; }
     </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div class="container">
            <div class="shortTop"></div>
            <div class="tallTop"></div>
            <div class="tallBottom"></div>
            <div class="shortBottom"></div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Darko Z 2009-07-10 05:35:13

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Creating interlocking, irregular borders with CSS.

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