Background gradients

In days gone by, to achieve a background gradient on an element, it was necessary to tile a thin graphical slice of the gradient. As graphics resources go, it's quite an economical trade-off. An image, only a pixel or two wide, isn't going to break the bandwidth bank and on a single site it can be used on multiple elements.

However, if we need to tweak the gradient it still requires round-trips to the graphics editor. Plus, occasionally, content might 'break out' of the gradient background, extending beyond the images' fixed size limitations. This problem is compounded with a responsive design, as sections of a page may increase at different viewports.

With a CSS background-image gradient however, things are far more flexible. As part of the CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3, CSS enables us to create linear and radial background gradients. Let's look how we can define them.

Note

The specification for CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3...