positioning three divs with css

Question

Who likes riddles? ;)

I have three divs:

<div id="login" />
<div id="content" />  
<div id="menu" />  

How would I define the CSS styles (without touching the HTML) to have the menu-div as the left column, the login-div in the right column and the content-div also in the right column but below the login-div.

The width of every div is fixed, but the height isn't.

Answer 1

#menu {
  position:absolute;
  top:0;
  left:0;
  width:100px;
}
#content, #login {
  margin-left:120px;
}

Why this way? The menu coming last in the markup makes it tough. You might also be able to float both content and login right, and added a clear:right to content, but I think this might be your best bet. Without seeing the bigger picture, it is hard to give a solution that will definitely work in your case.

---

EDIT: This seems to work as well:

#content, #login {
  float:right;
  clear:right
}

---

More thoughts: The absolute positioning won't work (or won't work well) if you want to have the columns in a centered layout. The float seems to work - as long as you can get any border-between-columns type requirements to pan out with the float solution, you might be better off choosing that. Then again, if the site is supposed to be left align, I think that the absolute method would work very well for your needs.

Answer 2

Floats away... not perfect. Chris's answer seems a better solution.

#login {
  float: right;
  width: 400px;
  border: 1px solid #f00;
}

#content {
  clear: right;
  float: right;
  width: 400px;
  border: 1px solid #f00;
}

#menu {
  float: left;
  width: 400px;
  border: 1px solid #f00;
}

<div id="login">Login</div>
<div id="content">Content</div>
<div id="menu">Menu</div>