Smaller container but larger children
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en'> <head> <title>guillotine</title> <style rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> div#container { border: 1px solid black; margin: 0 20px; background: yellow; } div#float { background: gold; float: left; border: 1px solid black; width: 150px; height: 150px; margin: 5px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id='container'> <div id='float'> <p> Float text. <p> This text is chopped off! This text is chopped off! </p> </div> <ul> <li><a href='#'>Content on.</a></li> </ul> </div> </body> </html>