Why do my standard CSS Triangles have their points cut off? - html

Question

So I have the following two triangles:
The points are cut off, but my code is literally just this:
.navCaret {
position: relative;
float: right;
right: 5px;
top: 5px;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-top: 9px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 9px solid transparent;
border-left: 9px solid #ccc;
}
.navCaretOL {
position: relative;
float: right;
right: 9px;
top: 9px;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-top: 9px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 9px solid transparent;
border-left: 9px solid #333;
}
And as you can see in this JSFiddle, it actually DOESN'T cut the edges off when rendering these triangles in a JSFiddle.
All in all this could not be a more standard way of creating a pure CSS triangle and has worked for me many, many times. Anyone have any idea what could be causing this strange behavior? Thanks.
EDIT: By the way, confirmed to behave the same way in IE and Chrome, both latest versions.

Answer 1

OMG I just figured this out by going through my page and deleting each CSS rule line-by-line. Apparently the problem was caused by the following rule:
div.navUpper * {
padding-top: 4px;
}
'.navUpper' is the container my carets were in. The '*' selector was applying 4px padding to them -- the effects of which can be seen here: https://jsfiddle.net/6f4yxp4e/8/
Thanks again to those who responded -- you were both right in different ways.

Answer 2

The triangle is only pointy when the border stretches all the way to the center, meaning anything altering the content box has to be 0 - this includes width/height and padding. Check for other css rules that overwrite your height: 0; or add some padding.
.navCaret {
border-top: 9px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 9px solid transparent;
border-left: 9px solid #ccc;
outline: 1px solid red; /*for illustration purposes only*/
}
.navCaretOL {
height: 0;
width: 0;
border-top: 9px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 9px solid transparent;
border-left: 9px solid #333;
white-space: nowrap; /*for illustration purposes only*/
outline: 1px solid red; /*for illustration purposes only*/
}
<div class="navCaret">height != 0</div>
<br>
<div class="navCaretOL">height == 0 (content is overflowing)</div>