I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about CSS but this simple problem baffles me.

<div><span>sample text</span></div>

results in the div's height being smaller than the height of the span if the span has padding.

I realize that there are ways to use "float" to make the div size correctly, but floats always seem to introduce undesired side effects.

Isn't there a clean simple way to tell the div to size to fit its contents? Seems pretty basic to me. Maybe I'm missing something.