How do I “kill” the space in the top left corner of this example and actually have the ‘text text text’ use that space, effectively wrapping over and around the placeholder div?
example of current (non-working) code: http://jsfiddle.net/bYZHd/
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
<style>
#parent
{
background-color: Orange;
height: 600px;
width: 600px;
}
#placeholder
{
background-color: Navy;
height: 500px;
width: 100px;
position: relative;
top: 100px;
left: 0px;
float: left;
display: inline-block;
}
#content
{
display: inline;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div id="parent">
<div id="placeholder"></div>
<div id="content">
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
</div>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
graphic of what I want: 
I’ve done a little more research on this question and have come up with an alternate answer.
The answer I’m using comes from here, but a more comprehensive list of possible solutions can be found from this Stack Overflow question. First though, verify that I’ve done what you wanted. http://jsfiddle.net/bYZHd/7/
I used the solution involving a “pusher” element. Place an empty div outside the parent buffer, give it a height, float it to the left and clear it. Then the placeholder element won’t have to adjust its positioning.
In general, wrapping text above an element is not easy to do in CSS. The answer given in the link mentions having to manually adjust the height of the pusher element using JS. But in your case, you know exactly how far you want your placeholder to be from the top, so you can just hardcode the height.
Below is an example of the edited code