How do CSS triangles work?

css, css-shapes, geometry, polygon

Solution

CSS Triangles: A Tragedy in Five Acts

As alex said, borders of equal width butt up against each other at 45 degree angles:

When you have no top border, it looks like this:

Then you give it a width of 0...

...and a height of 0...

...and finally, you make the two side borders transparent:

That results in a triangle.

Problem

There're plenty of different CSS shapes over at CSS Tricks - Shapes of CSS and I'm particularly puzzled with a triangle: ``` #triangle-up { width: 0; height: 0; border-left: 50px solid transparent; border-right: 50px solid transparent; border-bottom: 100px solid red; } ``` ``` <div id="triangle-up"></div> ``` How and why does it work?

Original source

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