How to position some elements on top of table-cell and some in the bottom?

Question

I need to position an element in the top corner of table-cell and text should stack in the bottom. I used vertical-align: bottom to move all the text down, but now I have a problem with the top element, since table-cell doesn't support relative positioning... any ideas how can this be done?

<div style = "display: table-cell; vertical-align: bottom">
    <div class = "top"> Top corner</div>
    <h2> some text in the bottom </h2>
    <h3> some more text in the bottom </h3>
</div>

edit: It should look something like this

+-----------+   +-----------+  +------------+
|top text   |   |top text   |  |top text    |
|           |   |           |  |            |
|some long  |   |           |  |            |
|text       |   |           |  |            |
|more long  |   |           |  |            |
|text       |   |           |  |            |
|end of     |   |           |  |some text   |
|text       |   |text       |  |text        |
|<button>   |   |<button>   |  |<button>    |
+-----------+   +-----------+  +------------+

This all is wrapped in a div with display:table. The reason I want to use display:table-cell here is to keep these columns equal height and still flexible to accommodate different length of text in the columns.

Answer 1

http://jsfiddle.net/Hwvd5/

Basically what I did was putting a full-size wrapper div into it which is position: relative. Hope this works cross-browser, only tested in chromium ...

Problem with this approach: you won't be able to let the browser automatically choose a height for the columns that matches the content without having them overlap. :( I could think of no way to fix this.

Files from JSFiddle

<br /> <br />

<div class="table">
    <div>
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
        First cell  <br />    
    </div>
    <div>
        <div class="wrapper">
          <div class = "top"></div>
          <h2> some text in the top </h2>
          <h3> some more text in the bottom </h3>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

CSS:

.top {
    position: absolute;        
    top: 0;
    right: 0;
    width: 10px;
    height: 10px;
    background: red;
}

h3 {
    position: absolute;
    bottom: 0;    
}

.table {
    display: table-row;
}

.table > div {
    display: table-cell; 
    vertical-align: bottom; 
    border: 1px solid black; 
    padding: 10px; 
    height: 200px;   
}

.table > div > div.wrapper {
    position: relative; 
    width: 100%; 
    height: 100%;   
}​
​

Answer 2

Add this to the <td>:

style="vertical-align:top"