css3 - How do CSS triangles work?

There're plenty of different CSS shapes over at CSS Tricks - Shapes of CSS and I'm particularly puzzled with a triangle:

#triangle-up {

  width: 0;
  height: 0;
  border-left: 50px solid transparent;
  border-right: 50px solid transparent;
  border-bottom: 100px solid red;
}

How and why does it work?

Answer

As alex said, borders of equal width butt up against each other at 45 degree angles:

When you have no top border, it looks like this:

Then you give it a width of 0...

...and a height of 0...

...and finally, you make the two side borders transparent:

That results in a triangle.