rainborick - 4:25 pm on May 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

The best way I know of to avoid opacity inheritance issues is to use rgba() colors for text and background colors rather than relying on CSS opacity. You lose compatibility with IE8 and lower, but that's a quickly shrinking percentage of the audience and you can often work around them by using transparent .png background images.

That lets you nest your <div>s and makes your positioning issues much simpler.