There’s a general trend in crafting long-form site navigation that use an “off-canvas” UI model. In this mode, expanded site navigation consisting of more than half-a-dozen links is brought in from outside the browser window when the user calls for it.

The site that you’re reading now uses a variation of the technique that might be called “under-canvas”: if the browser window is narrow enough, the site navigation is hidden beneath the site content, and revealed by sliding the content to one side.

Either model works well in responsive design, but it’s also possible to have site navigation folded within the page, rather than above or below the main canvas area.

Every HTML element can be provided with a basic border via CSS, using one of 10 styles: none, hidden, solid, dashed, dotted, groove, ridge,  double, inset and outset. There are also three CSS3 border styles – wave, dot-dash, and dot-dot-dash – that are not yet supported in any browser.

The thickness of CSS borders is commonly defined in pixels, due to the fact that they are usually set to a “hairline” width in most site designs. Technically, border-width can be defined with any CSS measurement system supported by the browser, with the exception of percentages. The hue of a border can also be defined using any CSS color system, allowing for the possibility of semi-transparent borders.

CSS writers are the blind swordsmen of web development: we pen declarations and throw them at HTML documents hoping that something might stick, but rarely are we aware of the specific content of a selected element: the question of how many words are in a paragraph, or if it contains any words at all, has traditionally been the responsibility of JavaScript, PHP, and other languages.

Very often server-side languages will be employed to fire dynamic content into HTML containers on a page. When such an operation fails, front-end developers deserve equal time to address the issue: rather than trying to code around a load problem using only JavaScript and PHP, we can add CSS to style the empty containers.