Stretched Absolute Top Aligned
<!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"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title></title> <style type="text/css" title="text/css"> * .grandContainer { position: relative; height: 300px; width: 700px; border: 2px solid black; background: red; } * .parent { margin: 10px; padding: 10px; padding-top: 0; border: 1px solid black; background: purple; } * .extraStyle { padding: 5px; border: 5px solid black; width: 120px; text-align: center; position: relative; } * .extraStyle span { left: 0; width: 130px; height: auto; } #myStyle { height: auto; top: 0; margin-top: 0; bottom: 0; margin-bottom: 0; position: absolute; margin-left: 510px; background-color: gold; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="grandContainer">Positioned Grandparent <div class="parent">Non-positioned Parent <span id="myStyle" class="extraStyle"><span>Stretched Absolute</span></span> </div> </div> </body> </html>