I love building websites. But, the long arduous efforts to get page layouts done, scare me. So started experimenting with ways to create arbitrary grid layouts, so I can write a layout manager someday , to take care of this business for me. I refer the reader to this excellent post on "What does width:100% do in CSS" to get a feel for block elements vs inline elements. To summarize, block elements generate a newline before and after them, but setting their width to something takes effect absolutely, i.e whether or not there is enough content inside the element to fill up the space. This is much like "fill_parent" in the android world. Inline elements are the opposite. They don't have the newline , but by default they expand only as much as their content, like "wrap_content" in android world. However, what we need is a container that would behave as a block element, housing child elements that will be laid out horizontally, as well as vertica