I want a border on the left and right of something.
So I did this



However, no borders showed up.

The only way I've gotten it to work is:


But that seems so repetitive.

That is the only way to go about it. Well:

Or I suppose you could do:

I think that'll give a redeclaration error in the W3C CSS validator because you declare a border in the first line, then redeclare it (thusly overwriting it) in the next two lines.

There is no redeclaration error, that's what CSS means Cascading Style Sheets

No, you misunderstand... Cascading is from one defined element/class/id to another. When you define a property that has already been declared in the same element/class/id, you're redeclaring it. Since the border attribute is a short-hand method for using border-width, border-style, and border-color, specifying any of those again is redeclaring it --- not using the cascade.

Since you made me double check myself to be sure I was right, here's the code:

...and the resulting W3C's CSS Validator results:
...so, although it's valid, it does throw an error (ok, a warning, I still think a warning IS an error). The 'o' before the CSS properties, it was a bulleted list from the validator.

The proper way to write this would be

border: solid #FFF;
border-width: 2px 0;

I hope that helps.

Yeah, thanks all, I got it working now

I didn't know about that. Thanks for pointing it out.

No problem, glad to help.

While I'm replying, I'd just like to point out that IAIHMB beat James to the punch, and did it properly; James isn't usually wrong, so pointing out that he should have said 0 2px rather than his 2px 0 is a bit of an ironically happy moment for me - though meant in jest since I know he understands CSS 20x more than I.

Although you are correct that I got the border-width: transposed, because I mis-read his original code.

David (IAIHMB) did not post the proper code, although his will work sorta, it's bad practice and mine, excepting the transposition is good practice.

All I know is that it's all good for me in the end

Not only do I get code that works, but I get the understanding of why it works and why it should be done that way.

Hrm, where will mine break? I know that I've omitted the border style and it's supposed to default to none, but everything since Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Navigator 4 (Not first hand, from the CSS Pocket Reference.) defaults to solid once a width has been defined.

Didn't say yours would break, I said it's bad practice.