Puzzle: how would you do this 1-column (!) layout?

[Daniel Déchelotte]

Hi,

I would like to present one column, extending from the top to the bottom
of the viewport, with textured "drop-down shadow" and a textured
background. A bit like http://www.blogger.com/, but with textures
instead of solid colors and more importantly the column should adapt to
the viewport's width and to the default font size.

Here is my tentative checklist:
* column width of 50em, or 100% of viewport's width, whichever is smaller
(for IE, that will have to be, say, 80% of the viewport's width)
* column spanning from top to bottom of the viewport
* should work in standard compliant browsers, and latest Win/IE
(conditionnal comments and javascript "helper" functions okay)
* bonus: I feel it would look better if the texture scrolled with the
page (instead of being fixed) and if a bit of the shadow was shown
even when the viewport is narrow (currently, you see a plain white
rectangle if the viewport's width is less than 50em)

And here are my tentatives so far:
* http://yo.dan.free.fr/tmp/1column-perfect.htm
"perfect rendering" (textures lign up exactly, no width restriction)
but quite a few empty DIVs for styling purposes
* http://yo.dan.free.fr/tmp/1column-limited.htm (similar to above)
textures lign up exactly, and less DIVs and images are needed. The
flip side is that the background is not x-repeated, affecting
(extremely) wide displays
* http://yo.dan.free.fr/tmp/1column-sensible.htm
This approach is a bit different from the two above.
Even simpler HTML code, background that can span infinite width,
but images no longer line up exactly. Not a big deal with the
images I use here.

My amateur CSS skills made it work for standard compliants browsers, but
it breaks severly with any IE version. Could you share a few tips to fix
the major issues? Does relaxing one particular requirement suddenly make
the problem much easier? Thanks in advance for your time.

(In sig, the address of my current personal site, with a few
more-than-half-broken workarounds for IE. This is what I hope to
improve)

--
Daniel Déchelotte
http://yo.dan.free.fr/