(main content)
Here's a whole bunch of content that gets moved around from item to item. Here's a whole bunch of content that gets moved around from item to item. Here's a whole bunch of content that gets moved around from item to item. Here's a whole bunch of content that gets moved around from item to item.
To make a side navigation bar (which is floated) appear to extend to the full height of the content, you can use a fat border on the content the same width and color as the sidebar's background. (In this case, the border is a darker yellow to show what's going on.)
The above layout methodology works fine for IE6Win, IE5Mac, Safari, and (mostly) Mozilla. Mozilla doesn't properly honor the clear:left/clear:right styles (extending the parent container to extend down to the floated point) unless the parent container has a bottom border or bottom padding specified. (IEMac screws things up royally when manipulating the DOM, but that's separate from the CSS layout methodology working properly.)