Vertical (column-like) content alignment

This question might have been answered before, but i didn't manage to find a clear and complete answer anywhere.

Many webpages ( even stackoverflow ) today have some kind of "column display" of their content. If you looks at this page , you can see two major columns. While I could take a look at the source and find out the exact styling and formatting, I would like to ask this question anyway. How is this formatting done correctly? I can thing of few options:

• use tables


• use inline-block and floating


• some other kind of css-games to get what is wanted.

Which of these options would be the best to use? Handling page resize in any of the cases would be extremely painful. I could always make a mobile version, so that's not much of a problem.