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 tradeoff. 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 image's 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 at how we can define them.

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