This is a common problem, but it's definitely possible. In fact, it was just written about recently:
"In order to become a skilled CSS developer, you need to understand the
underlying concepts of CSS that make it work and not just how to
produce certain visual effects. The 'block formatting context' is one
of those concepts that drives how CSS affects your page without you
even knowing it. Most of the time, you don't need to worry about it;
it's just something that's going on behind the scenes that you don't
need to get involved with. Sometimes, however, the lack of a new
context can make elements interact in undesirable ways. The primary
reason for setting a new context is to keep cleared elements inside a
main content div from clearing floated sidebars. We'll use this problem
as a case study for how to establish new block formatting contexts and
to see what their effect is on the other elements around them."
The solution is different depending on what kind of (browser) audience you have, but there are definitely alternatives to falling back on a table.
--ivan
On 7/11/06, Darrel O'Pry <dopry@thing.net> wrote: On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 15:26 +0200, Steven Wittens wrote:
> >
> > I say this even though I am a CSS zealot and have created several
> > non CMS sites which have no tables and would do them no other way.
> > I ended up using a single table in my design because in order to
> > get the footer in the right place the left and right columns were
> > floated. Once you have floated columns you cannot use clear in the
> > content because the content will then clear the columns which is
> > not what you want. You need to be able to use clear in the content
> > so that you can float multiple images to one side and have them
> > appear under on another which requires clear.
>
> Non-sense. The piefecta layout and many others (such as drupal.org
> itself) are 100% tableless and can accomodate clears in the content.
>
> Steven Wittens
You may need an additional wrapper around you content to constrain the
clear, or a parent with position: relative. I can't remember.