Horizontally Stretched Absolute
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.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" media="Screen"> * .grandContainer { position: relative; z-index: 10; background: red; } #hsa { position: absolute; width: auto; left: 0; margin-left: -30px; right: 0; margin-right: -30px; height: auto; top: auto; margin-top: 30px; bottom: auto; margin-bottom: auto; background: gold; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="grandContainer">Positioned Grandparent <div class="parent">Non-positioned Parent <span id="hsa" class="s">Horizontally Stretched Absolute</span> </div> </div> </body> </html>