CSS margins: aligning a list against a float-left image

The following is my first cut at coding-up a reddit-like comment in html+css. I have a few questions about css and the general structure:

How do I get the comment body ("The King took off his hat...") to align with the comment head ("Nathan, posted...") and the comment tail ("reply permalink ...")? I tried making the margin-bottom for .comment-left a little longer but that didn't fix the issue.
I know I've been a little trigger-happy with the tags. Which ones are redundant?
Is there a better/tighter way to get the same structure?

Thanks all, Nathan

ps I used the handy information here for stacking my voting arrows on top of each other.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>CSS sandbox: comments</title>

    <style type="text/css">

      .vote {
        width: 15px;        
        float: left;
        clear: left;      
      }
      .vote img {
        display: block;
        float: none;
        clear: both;
        width: 15px;
      }
      .userpic img {
        width: 60px;
      }
      .comment-contents li {
        list-style-type: none;
        margin-bottom: 10px;
      }
      .comment-left {
        float: left;
      }
      .head {
        margin-left:10px;
      }
      .tail-list li {
        display: inline;
      }
      img {
        border: 0;
      }
      a {
        text-decoration: none;
      }
    </style>
  </head>

  <body>
    <div class="comment">
       <span class="comment-left">
        <span class="vote">
          <a href="#"><img alt="^" title="vote up" src="http://www.reddit.com/static/aupgray.gif"></a>
          <a href="#"><img alt="v" title="vote down" src="http://www.reddit.com/static/adowngray.gif"></a>
        </span>
        <span class="userpic">
          <a href="#">
          <img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/550deada0ac679dfc3c9103b674760af?s=128&d=identicon&r=PG" height="60" width="60">
          </a>
        </span>
       </span>

       <span class="comment-main">
        <ul class="comment-contents">
          <li class="head">
           <a href="#">Nathan</a>, posted 2 hours ago
           <a href="#" class="comment-collapse">[-]</a>
          </li>
          <li class="middle">
            <p>The king took off his hat and looked at it. Instantly an immense
            crowd gathered. The news spread like wildfire. From a dozen leading
            dailies,reporters and cameramen came rushing to the scene pellmell in
            highpowered monoplanes. Hundreds of reserves,responding without
            hesitation to a riotcall,displayed with amazing promptness quite
            unparalleled inability to control the everincreasing multitude,but
            not before any number of unavoidable accidents had informally
            occurred.</p>

            <p>Chapter 1 - untitled (eecummings)</p>
          </li>
          <li class="tail">
           <ul class="tail-list">
            <li><a href="#">reply</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">permalink</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">offensive?</a></li>
           </ul>
          </li>
        </ul>
      </span>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Solution

Update your css with a left padding on ".comment-contents li" and a remove the margin on ".head"

.comment-contents li {
list-style-type: none;
margin-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 60px;
}

.head {
margin-left:0px;
}

While you are at it, just use padding instead of margin for ".comment-contents li":

.comment-contents li {
list-style-type: none;
padding: 0 0 10px 60px;
}

I recommend not using padding and margin on a class unless absolutly necessary.