what am I doing wrong here?

Looks like there is something off with the <div> tags and their widths. First thing I would try is to decrease the width on the .sidebar class in your CSS by 5 or 10 pixels and see if it snaps into shape. Sometimes with floats it is a little flaky if there is not enough room and it will go below the <div> that it should be next to.

I tried pulling it down by a 5-10-20 pixels and all it did was cut the box out.
I think that it’s a wrap-box class in the CSS.
perhaps if I made the center thinner?

I think that you have me pointed in the right direction though.
thanks

I played around with it for a little while, but couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. Although I couldn’t spend a lot of time on it. I did try several different values for all the columns and it still didn’t stack right.

Looking at the code, I am not sure why someone would code the left column at the end of the html and then float it left. In my opinion it is easier to code it first (before the other columns) in the html and float the center column and then the right column. You may want to try something like that, it shouldn’t be too hard to change.

I am not sure why someone would code the left column at the end of the html and then float it left.

Because there is something called “content first in source code” – meaning that your real content should come first in the code and not the sidebar: useful for accessibility, SE indexing etc.

Ok, I was not thinking about that aspect of it. But I have found that those type of layouts are more fragile than say a three column layout where the left column is coded first, not last.

Just curious, how much of a benefit is it to have the ‘content first in code’ over the type of layout I am speaking?