OK after some tweaking, playing, crying, and drinking here is my solution, and hell it even works
<body>
<div id="page-box" class="shadow curved" >
<header id="page-header" class="shadow" ><?php include("content/page_header.php"); ?><h1>Virtual International Flying Club, for the enjoyment of virtual flight and building of friendships</h1></header>
<nav id="site-nav" class="shadow" ><h2>Site Navigation</h2><?php include("menu/menu.html"); ?></nav>
<div id="content">
<div id="one-column">
<section id="main-article">
<aside id="aside-box" class="curved">
<article id="event-calendar"><?php include("content/calendar.html"); ?></article>
<article id="server-status"><?php include("content/teamspeak.html"); ?></article>
<article id="vatsim-link"><?php include("content/vatsim.html"); ?></article>
</aside><!-- close second-column-->
<?php include("content/main_page.html"); ?>
</section>
<section id="blog">
<?php include("content/news_blog.html"); ?>
</section>
</div><!-- close one-column-->
</div><!-- close content -->
<footer id="page-footer"><?php include("footer/footer.php"); ?><h4>Footer</h4></footer>
</div><!-- close page-box -->
</body>
the new css added
#one-column {width:880px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; }
#aside-box {width:200px; float:right; margin-left:5px; margin-top:5px; padding:5px; background: rgba(251, 228, 81, 0.4);}
and the special work around for IE
#aside-box {background:#FDF3B3;}
effectively now this is a template that I can swap out PHP includes to build new pages rapidly.
My vote is HTML5 and CSS3 is good to go and once the W3C makes it official some of the CSS code will clean up a bit, but dive right in and start using it now.
site is
dev.flyvifc.org more pages coming up soon.