Icon View Style Grid Layout?

For a couple of projects now, I've wanted a grid layout engine that is similar to how desktops display lists of icons: nearly fixed width items, but varying slightly in height, displayed on a variable width page, so your layout could end up with 1 column or 8 depending on the width of the browser window. Tables are no good because they're always a fixed number of columns. Div elements using float works, so long as you make all the elements a fixed width, but they also have to be the same height, or you'll end up with gaps. I'm thinking it's going to have to be javascript driven including redrawing when the page size changes, and to manually size all items to the tallest item in the row, but I can't seem to find an example on the web anywhere (or my Google foo is weak).

Dear lazy web, can you point me in the right direction?