JavaScript Gradient Roundrects adds gradient roundrects to an HTML page, without images. It uses the WHATWG canvas tag if it’s available. Otherwise it uses a stack of divs, whose heights are adaptively chosen according to the height of the graded element, the color components, and the radius curvature. There’s a demo here.

I also wrote a JavaScript CSS parser that lets you attach gradients to an element without writing code. You do this by including CSS inside a div tag whose class is ‘style’. View the source of the demo page for an example.