Can I create a two-column layout that fluidly adapts to narrow windows?

Posted by Brant Bobby on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Brant Bobby
Published on 2010-12-30T21:26:46Z Indexed on 2010/12/30 21:54 UTC
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I'm trying to design a page that has two columns of content, div#left and div#right. (I know these aren't proper semantic identifiers, but it makes explaining easier) The widths of both columns are fixed.
Desired result - wide viewport
Desired result - Wide viewport

When the viewport is too narrow to display both side-by-side, I want #right to be stacked on top of #left, like this:
Desired result - narrow viewport
Desired result - narrow viewport

My first thought was simply to apply float: left to #left and float: right to #right, but that makes #right attach itself to the right side of the window (which is the proper behavior for float, after all), leaving an empty space. This also leaves a big gap between the columns when the browser window is really wide.
Opposite floats
Wrong - div#right is not flush with the left side of the viewport

Wrong one on top
Wrong - div#right is not on top of div#left

Applying float: left to both divs would result in the wrong one moving to the bottom when the window was too small. I could probably do this with media queries, but IE doesn't support those until version 9. The source order is unimportant, but I need something that works in IE7 minimum. Is this possible to do without resorting to Javascript?

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