The height of a block element defaults to the height of the block's content. So, given something like this:
<div id="outer">
<div id="inner">
<p>Where is pancakes house?</p>
</div>
</div>
#inner will grow to be tall enough to contain the paragraph and #outer will grow to be tall enough to contain #inner.
When you specify the height or width as a percentage, that's a percentage with respect to the element's parent. In the case of width, all block elements are, unless specified otherwise, as wide as their parent all the way back up to <html>; so, the width of a block element is independent of its content and saying width: 50% yields a well defined number of pixels.
However, the height of a block element depends on its content unless you specify a specific height. So there is feedback between the parent and child where height is concerned and saying height: 50% doesn't yield a well defined value unless you break the feedback loop by giving the parent element a specific height.
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