Marching Ants is a common technique for showing a selection area in an image. The selection border has animated dashes to help distinguish between the selection and the image contents.

Marching ants in Photoshop
This is a CSS technique for a rectangular marching ants that has advantages over other common techniques:
- The contents of the selected area don’t need to be opaque
- Doesn’t require divs several divs for each edge of the animation
The CSS property border-image will do the heavy-lifting for us. Border-image is a strange beast because the name makes it sounds like an alternative to border-style (e.g. solid, dashed, dotted), but it’s really a 9-slice technique that even can fill the padding and content area with an image.
We’ll start with a 10px x 10px animated gif that is composed of nine tiles: 1×1 in the corners, 1×8 or 8×1 on the edges, and 8×8 in the center. The center tile is transparent so that we can let the area behind out element show through.

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Our CSS will set border-image and specify that the slice is 1px from the edge and that the image should repeat instead of being stretched.
.selectionIndicator {
border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 8 repeat repeat;
-moz-border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 1 repeat repeat;
-webkit-border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 1 repeat repeat;
}
The result is very close to what you see in Photoshop or other programs. It’s great for creating a cropping UI.

Major caveat: border-image isn’t supported in IE <= 10.