How to make round corners to both inside of a box and its border?

Another solution is to have matching inner and outer borders combined with border-radius is to "fake" the border using the <spread-radius> value of the box-shadow property. This produces a solid shadow which can easily pass for a regular border.

For instance, to achieve a 4px border and a 4px white border radius, try this:

/* rounded corners */
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
border-radius: 4px;

/* drop shadow */
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px #fff;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px #fff;
box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px #fff;

If you want to add a "real" drop shadow to the entire container, you can simply chain your shadow statements like so:

/* drop shadow */
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px rgba(255,255,255,1.0),
        1px 1px 8px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px rgba(255,255,255,1.0),
        1px 1px 8px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 4px rgba(255,255,255,1.0),
        1px 1px 8px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.4);

Note: Keep in mind here that the order of the statements is the order in which it will be rendered.

The only thing to beware of is that the initial "faux border" will overlap the first X pixels (where X is the width of the border) of any shadow you want beneath it (and combine, if you're using RGBa opacity on it below 100%.)

So it won't work in all situations, but it'll get the majority. I use this pretty frequently when regular borders are not ideal.


Inner border calculations

First, you'll need to remove -vendor-background-clip: padding-box or set them to border-box the default in order to achieve the inner border radius.

The inner border radius is calculated as the difference of the outer border radius (border-radius) and the border width (border-width) such that

inner border radius = outer border radius - border width

Whenever the border-width is greater than the border-radius, the inner border radius is negative and you get some awkward inverted corners. Currently, I don't believe there is a property for adjusting the inner-border-radius, so you'll need to calculate it manually.

In your case:

inner border radius = 6px - 5px = 1px

Your new CSS should be:

.radius-all { border-radius: 6px; -moz-border-radius: 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; }
.template-bg { background: #FFF; }
.template-border { border: 5px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2); }

Simply subtract the border-radius (6px) values from the border-width value (5px) in order to achieve your desired inner-border-radius:


Code that works for me

Tested on Firefox 3.x, Google Chrome, and Safari 5.0

 .radius-all { border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; }
.template-bg { background: #FFF; }
.template-border { border: 5px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); } /* Note that white on white does not distinguish a border */

Adding color overlays in JavaScript

<script type="text/javascript">
    var bodyBgColor = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].style.backgroundColor;;

    // insert opacity decreasing code here for hexadecimal

    var header = document.getElementsByTagName('header')[0];
    header.style.backgroundColor = bodyBgColor;
</script>

I'm not entirely sure how to do hexadecimal arithmetic in JavaScript but I'm sure you can find an algorithm in Google.


Applying General Borders

Are you using a separate box <div> for your border through its background property? If so, you'll need to apply border-radius and its vendor specific properties on both the border box and the inner box:

<div id="border-box" style="border-radius: 5px;">
    <div id="inner-box" style="border-radius: 5px;">
    </div>
</div>

A much more efficient way would simply have the inner-box manage its own border:

<div id="inner-box" style="border: 4px solid blue; border-radius: 5px">
    <!-- Content -->
</div>

CSS-wise, you could just declare a .rounded-border class and apply it to every box that will have rounded borders:

.rounded-borders {
    border-radius: 5px;
    -moz-border-radius: 5px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
    -khtml-border-radius: 5px;
}

And apply the class to any boxes that will have rounded borders:

<div id="border-box" class="rounded-borders">
    <div id="inner-box" class="rounded-borders">
    </div>
</div>

For a single box element, you'll still be required to declare the border size in order to be shown:

<style type="text/css">
    #inner-box { border: 4px solid blue; }
</style>

<div id="inner-box" class="rounded-borders">
</div>