How to create dotted border with round dots in WebKit browsers?

Question

In WebKit driven browsers, e.g. Safari, Chrome, borders with their style declared as dotted are rendered with square dots instead of round.

Is there any way to force rendering of round dots seamlessly across browsers?

Reference Test

• on jsFiddle

Answer 1

A natively supported solution is currently lacking, as the specification does not define these properties explicitly, and leaves it for the browser's implementation.

You may, however, use SVG to create the border, as it offers full control over the characteristics you're after.

Draw a line, than define its stroke-dasharray and stroke-linecap attributes to achieve the desired effect.

Example Code Snippet

<line 
    x1="40" x2="260" 
    y1="100" y2="100" 
    stroke="#5184AF" 
    stroke-width="20" 
    stroke-linecap="round" 
    stroke-dasharray=".001, 30" />

Result Snapshot

Demo

• http://jsfiddle.net/eliranmal/hsfxS/

References (on Mozilla Developer Network)

• stroke-dasharray
• stroke-linecap

Answer 2

I also had this problem but I only needed three round dots under my menu item. So I just used a terrible hack, but it worked: First of all I hooked in FontAwesome using @import Then added the round dot characters as content in the CSS:

#nav ul .current_page_item a:after {
    font-family: 'FontAwesome';
    content: "\f111  \f111  \f111";
    font-size: 6px;
    display: block;
}