CSS-d,

I have been looking around the web to try and find the right solution 
for my issue. Although I've seen many articles describing how to get two 
or three columns to match each others length, I can't quite seem to 
apply the information to my situation.

Unfortunately I can't show a live example, but I've uploaded a 
screenshot and the CSS to here:
Screenshot: http://autotelic.com/Screenshot.png
CSS: http://autotelic.com/style.css

I've added borders so that it's more clear where the boundaries of the 
relevant <div> tags are.

I have a "container" <div> (green border), and inside of it is a 
"side-menus" <div> (blue border) and a "article container" <div> (purple 
border). The side-menus <div> is floated to the left, and the 
article-container <div> has a margin on the left side that is a little 
wider than the side-menu's width. I think it's a fairly standard 
approach to creating a two column layout, except that both columns 
happen to be inside a <div>.

I don't need necessarily need either the side-menu or article-container 
<div>s to stretch to match the other. This seems to be the effect that 
most online instructions cater to.

What I need is for the container <div> to stretch out to be as long as 
whichever of the side-menu or article-container is longest, so that its 
borders and background enclose both columns all the way down to the bottom.

Right now, basically the container stretches to match the height of the 
article-container column only. So if the article-container side happens 
to be longer than the side-menus, all is good.

But, if the side-menus column is longer, as it is in the screenshot, 
then its content stretches past the background of the container. No good.

At first I thought my problem was the "collapsing margins" issue 
described here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/box.html#collapsing-margins

But I've added a 1 pixel padding to all sides of the relevant <div>s, 
and it still doesn't work.

Then I read that when a <div> is floated, it falls outside of the 
document flow. However, what I don't get is that I have a footer below 
both Left and Right, that has a "clear: both" property in it. So it 
slides underneath the side-menus, and pulls down the length of the 
container. I thought that setting the height on all the nested <div>s to 
100% should at least have some effect, but it doesn't.

At this point I'm quite confused.

Can anyone recommend a reliable way to get the <div>s inside my 
container <div> to reliably reach down to the footer?

Thank you for any advice.

-- 
Dave M G
CSSed
Zend Studio 5.5
Photoshop 7 (Wine)
Inkscape, GIMP, Ubuntu 7.04
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