Take a look at this piece of code
The height of the div is set to 100px, and overflow: hidden is hiding the content over 100px. What I want to do is to make the <ul> element fluid so regardless of the height of the parent div, the <h2> element stays at the top, .controlpanel div stays at the bottom and the <ul> element resizes to fit. I tried using percentage heights but it's possible to get them accurate.
Hard to understand the question :P but i think i got the gist of what you want, check it out http://jsfiddle.net/andresilich/Y7gKB/9/