fixing height of the containing block

[johnnyblotter]

Hi again,

I got nicely dissed for my sloppy XHTML last time - which was actually a good thing. Anyway, I'm working through the floatutorial http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/
deal from Max design (yup, I'm pretty much a newb) and I can't figure out how to extend the height of the page when making these two and three column layout. They resize according to the amount of text. Setting the height of the container block to 768 or whatever throws the other elements out of whack. How do I properly fix this?

[joe]

There is no easy way to fix this without lots of unneeded code. If they are simple repeating image or fixed colour columns then assign a background image to the container and set it to repeat the full length downwards. This creates the illusion of columns stretching below their content.

A good step-by-step tutorial on this can be found on A List Apart here (http://alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/).