Whilst teaching recently, someone asked about columns with equal heights. Whilst familiar with what seems to be the ‘default’ method, i.e. add a background image, I realised that this won’t deal with all necessary situations.
If you absolutely have to add three columns with different background colours, try this ingenious method:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts/
The only ‘problem’ that I can see is that it only deals with background colours, rather than images. The colours for the columns are set by setting the background colours of the container’s border, which rules out images.
If you need to add background images to more than one column, then try this:
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/equalheight