general container - IE8 horizontal scrollbar problem

Question

I ran into the following problem:
how to make a general container (HTML + CSS; no javascript)
that is contrained vertically (it has a fixed outer height), so it may have

Answer 1

Floating will probably get the result you're looking for. Check out my example here:
http://jsbin.com/ivegi4/4/edit

I took away the containing divs, as I didn't think they were necessary, but I wouldn't see a problem adding them back in if you absolutely needed them.

Answer 2

Set position: absolute on the container-div-3 div. This will cause the div to shrink-wrap whatever is inside, and works fine in IE8.