Alan Gresley wrote:

Sorry, but where did you find such beauty in the spec?

Yeah, nice shot of Carina Nebulae. That is courtesy of Hubble team, BTW.

I am not sure I understand your problem or idea of what you are trying to achieve. At least it is hard for me to imagine where such peculiar constructions can be used in practice.

Here is one practical layout that people are asking for in years: http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/images/image5.png

With current state of CSS it is simply impossible to reproduce it. (Currently, you can do it with <table> and in quirks mode only)

Floats were designed initially as a way to attach images and tables with the text - aside elements or call-outs. E.g. HTML 3.2 had only two elements that have @align evaluated to modern float:left/right: <img> and <table>. Floats was and still are not designed for types of positioning other than to put something aside of text.

Attempts to use floats for block positioning are extremely not scalable and not reliable now and for the future.

Here is David Baron's nice article about the subject http://dbaron.org/log/2005-12. That is, IMO, must read thing if you are seriously in business of teaching people of how to use CSS properly.

I've implemented CSS parser and CSS rendering engine by myself (CSS 2.1 and parts of CSS3). I suspect that I know CSS a bit better than average CSS author.

http://terrainformatica.com