Relative Absoluteness
HTML/CSS positioning has always had be pulling my hair out, with absolute positioning being the largest threat to my coiffure.
Well, today I found an excellent artical on all aspects of CSS positioning at BrainJar.com. Here's the excerpt that finally made everthing make sense to me:
The containing block of an absolutely positioned element is defined a little differently than it is for other elements. The containing block for an absolutely positioned element is established by its closest, positioned ancestor. That is, the nearest element outside it that has a position of absolute, relative or fixed. If there is no such ancestor element, the initial containing block (the browser window) is used.//
The full artical can be found here:
The section on absolute positioning is on page 4.