When I was a kid (well, a less decrepit and slightly less old man) and there was no calc(), we did that sort of thing with padding-left, float, and negative margin-left.

not bad! calc and inline-block is fairly recent, right?

From memory, calc is IE9 and inline-block is IE6.

http://caniuse.com/ can answer these questions for you in general. If you're looking into newer layout techniques, you should also check out flexbox.