What is the best way these days to make a visually interesting border around a div using images?   CSS3's border-image would perfect, but it's CSS3.  I don't want to rely on that yet.  Is there a CSS2-compatible way to accomplish the same thing?My audience is mostly with-it, tech-savvy, not needing hacks for decrepit old browsers, but aren't necessarily all up on the cutting edge like CSS3 either.As an alternative to CSS for this, I tried some experiments with 3x3 tables using the images as cell background or cell content. The main content would go in the middle cell.  I couldn't get the side images to stretch or repeat properly when the content varied.
CSS2 way of accomplishing what CSS3 border-image does?
css;images
I think the least kludgy solution would involve nesting two divs, and applying the border and a padding to the outer div.You may have to get creative with the application of the background, especially if it's anything more complicated than a tiling image, but it would avoid adding non-semantic tables to your markup. You should never use tables for layout.