‘Long clipped columns’ is an important, industry-recognised technique for creating the appearance of equal height in (floated) ‘columns’. It works through giving the columns a large padding-bottom and a large negative margin-bottom, and then setting the column-holder’s overflow to hidden so that all column padding below the ‘pulled-up’ bottom border edge of the column-holder is clipped.
In this minimal test case the column-holder has an orange background, and there is in-flow content after the column and after the column-holder. There is only one column: that with the red background. It is floated.
(Unrelated to the technique in question, note that in IE 6 – but not IE 7 or IE 8 beta 1 – this test case exhibits a bug in which the column is only clipped below the bottom edge of the in-flow content following the column holder. The line boxes of the in-flow content following the column are rendered underneath the background of the unclipped part of the floated column.
View other IE implementation bugs related to overflow.
Column content.
In-flow content following the column.
In-flow content following the column-holder. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.