How do CSS triangles work?

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.

The borders use an angled edge where they intersect (45° angle with equal width borders, but changing the border widths can skew the angle).

div {
  width: 60px;
  border-width: 30px;
  border-color: red blue green yellow;
  border-style: solid;
}

<div></div>

Have a look to the jsFiddle.

By hiding certain borders, you can get the triangle effect (as you can see above by making the different portions different colours). transparent is often used as an edge colour to achieve the triangle shape.

Start with a basic square and borders. Each border will be given a different color so we can tell them apart:

.triangle {
    border-color: yellow blue red green;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 200px 200px 200px 200px;
    height: 0px;
    width: 0px;
}

<div class="triangle"></div>

which gives you this:

But there's no need for the top border, so set its width to 0px. Now our border-bottom of 200px will make our triangle 200px tall.

.triangle {
    border-color: yellow blue red green;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0px 200px 200px 200px;
    height: 0px;
    width: 0px;
}

<div class="triangle"></div>

and we will get this:

Then to hide the two side triangles, set the border-color to transparent. Since the top-border has been effectively deleted, we can set the border-top-color to transparent as well.

.triangle {
    border-color: transparent transparent red transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0px 200px 200px 200px;
    height: 0px;
    width: 0px;
}

<div class="triangle"></div>

finally we get this: