Not certain I understand you. If I do, I've no idea what this would be called, but implementing it should be easy.
<style type="text/css">
/* around the entire news area (both normal and "leading news") */
.container
{
border: 1px solid black;
position: relative;
}
/* when you do have leading news, the class of the container should be both, i.e.
<div class="container leadingnews" ...> */
.container.leadingnews
{
padding-bottom: 35px;
}
/* ordinary news stuff */
.news
{
border: 1px solid red;
height: 200px;
}
/* this is the child with class .leadingnews, i.e.
the div containing the leading news text */
.container.leadingnews > .leadingnews
{
position: absolute;
bottom: 0px;
border: 1px solid blue;
width: 100%;
height: 35px;
line-height: 20px;
/* if you want to fit longer texts without adding height,
these two lines are needed ... */
overflow-x: scroll;
/* ... although this one could be skipped if you replace any whitespace with */
white-space: nowrap;
}
</style>
</head>
<body style="margin: 30px;">
<h3>Page with "leading news"</h3>
<div class="container leadingnews">
<div class="news">
Ordinary news area
</div>
<div class="leadingnews">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
</div>
</div>
<h3>Page without "leading news"</h3>
<div class="container">
<div class="news">
Ordinary news area
</div>
</div>
Works with FF 3.6, IE8, Chrome. It's entirely possible that IE7 or 6 would choke on white-space: nowrap, but replacing ws with &nbps; in your output string should solve that (and remove then need for that css attribute.
