CSS or HTML? And How?

[Soup]

Hi all, new here, but really excited about being part of the community. I work for a web design firm as the lead developer, but find myself feeling like a n00b more often than not, especially lately. Why? Well my newest project involves something I have no idea how to do. I've looked at the code, of course, on a website that uses the layout, but I can't tell a thing. I don't know if it's DIV FLOAT tags or CSS, but I'm sure someone here can help me.

It's pretty simple to explain. I need to make a table, I believe, that has an autostretch header and footer, or at least a 100% width, without stretching the middle cells where the text is. That's right. Here are a few sample websites to explain what i mean. Notice on both that if you stretch them out, the top and bottom images stretch out as well, but the content in the center never stretches out. Furthermore, no matter how high the table is, the header and footer stretch without breaking that middle cell. For instance, look at this one:

http://www.anblaw.com/

Stretch it out and see how the top and bottom stretches out? But now click on "Our Attorneys" and notice how that cell never stretches out, and it works no matter how long that "Our Attorneys" cell would be. Click the other menu items to see that. This may seem n00bish, but I mention that only because obviously it isn't a static background image causing it to look extended, like I'm familiar with doing. I've been assigned to head up a new project using this layout and I'm losing sleep at night.

Here are some other samples of this layout:

http://orangecountybar.org/
http://www.trojanlawoffices.com/

Can anyone help me?

[gumlor]

how about break the header, content & footer into three independent tables?

i.e.,

<table width="100%"><td>header</td></table>
<table width="600"><td>content</td></table>
<table width="100%"><td>footer</td></table>

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