Gradient horizontal rule

- [Chris] Hi, this is Chris Converse and in this episode, we'll style a horizontal rule element with CSS in order to create a fading effect on the right and left sides. So, if you'd like to follow along, download the exercise files and let's begin by opening the HTML file in your favorite text editor and when you have the HTML file open, up in the head area, you'll see a link to style that CSS, we'll be opening this in a moment. If we continue down, we have an article element and inside of the article element, we have two H2 elements and two paragraph elements. And so what we're going to do to begin in the HTML file is add a horizontal rule, so that'll be a less than sign, HR, then a greater than sign, and we're going to add this before the second h2 tag.

So, with that in place, save your HTML, let's go back to the exercise files, let's find style.css, let's open this in our text editor, let's scroll down, after the rule that targets the paragraph elements, let's come in here and add a new rule that's going to target the HR element. So, I'll type hr and then a space, add in our brackets, and set a few returns. Inside, let's begin by adding some margin properties and we'll set 30 pixels for the top and bottom then a space then 15% for the right and left value.

Next, let's set a height. We're going to set this to three pixels. Next line, let's set a border. Let's set this to zero. This will get rid of the inset border shadow that we have by default in most browsers. And then next we'll set some background image properties. So, type background-image: and then we'll type linear-gradient beginning and ending parenthesis and then a semicolon and then let's come in here and split the parenthesis open because we're going to add a couple of properties inside of here.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to set to space right, this will set the direction of the gradient, then a comma. On the next line we're going to set the color, we're going to use the rgba color space. So, rgba, beginning and ending parenthesis, then a comma, inside of the parenthesis we're going to set white which is 255 for red comma 255 for green comma 255 for blue comma then a 0 so that we have no color for the beginning.

Then we'll come in here, copy this entire line, paste it on the next line, the next line, and then finally the last line, so we'll have four copies of this color property. For the last one we'll remove the comma and then for the second color property, we're going to set the output of .5, then we'll do the same thing for the third color property and for the fourth one, we'll leave this at zero. So, with these rules in place, we'll hit Save then go back over to the browser and we'll now see the new background image property being defined inside of the horizontal rule and on the left hand side we start this at zero which is this property here.

On the right hand side, we end this with zero, which is this property here, and we go up to a maximum of .5 in the center and so now in the browser we have a gradient rule that is 50% white and fades off to 0% transparency on both the right and left edges. And so with that, I'll conclude this episode and, as always, thanks for watching.