If container height is given by percentage you have to wrap it in another div with display: table. And if container is supposed to behave like inline-block you have to wrap it in yet another one. If you need to sprinkle around some margins and paddings (esp. with percentage height) you have to choose boilerplate divs to apply them to carefully.

Btw. your approach is exactly same that we had 10 years ago but with CSS table behavior faking rather than table tag.

Yay. Progress.