I see CSS is only very rudimentary as for now.

Whenever you combine things that are not in the book, you get unpredictable results.

I am working on a design using the outside-in box model.

A wrapper div defines the width in percentages, and the float.

An inner div defines all margins, padding, etc.

I tried to tile the sidebar, to have it look the same length as the main column.

Does not work. I checked my CSS and HTML. Validation without mistakes.

I checked the line of code doing the tiling: I got perfect tiling on the background putting it into the body CSS.

I hope CSS 3 will make CSS more logical and give us more predictable results than those endless trial and errors, browser hacks, etc.

I see CSS is only very rudimentary as for now.

Rudimentary ?? I wouldn't go THAT far. CSS 1 was rudimentary.

Whenever you combine things that are not in the book, you get unpredictable results.

Since when is everything EVER in any ONE book ?? Never is in my experience.

I hope CSS 3 will make CSS more logical and give us more predictable results than those endless trial and errors

Maybe.. maybe not. Chances are there will be a whole crop of NEW things to deal with .

Lets see the URL or the code, perhaps one of us NOT using a book can help

I hope CSS 3 will make CSS more logical and give us more predictable results than those endless trial and errors

Why would CSS3 change any of that? Maybe the spec's will change it, but they are only specs. The companies making the browsers will have to follow the specs for there to be any change at all.. As far as I know, right now, the only thing CSS3 is doing is giving us some cool new pseudo classes, and some new properties that have already been supported by vendor extensions.

Since when is everything EVER in any ONE book ??

I don't know if everything is a correct term here, but a heck of a lot of information on CSS and vendor extensions, hacks, etc is in The Ultimate CSS Reference.

You say you are having some problems. Could you post a link or give us some code to work with?

Cheers