How to set height property for SPAN

Solution 1:

Give it a display:inline-block in CSS - that should let it do what you want.
In terms of compatibility: IE6/7 will work with this, as quirks mode suggests:

IE 6/7 accepts the value only on elements with a natural display: inline.

Solution 2:

Use

.title{
  display: inline-block;
  height: 25px;
}

The only trick is browser support. Check if your list of supported browsers handles inline-block here.

Solution 3:

this is to make display:inline-block work in all browsers:

Quirkly enough, in IE (6/7) , if you trigger hasLayout with "zoom:1" and then set the display to inline, it behaves as an inline block.

.inline-block {
    display: inline-block;
    zoom: 1;
    *display: inline;
}

Solution 4:

Assuming you don't want to make it a block element, then you might try:

.title  {
    display: inline-block; /* which allows you to set the height/width; but this isn't cross-browser, particularly as regards IE < 7 */
    line-height: 2em; /* or */
    padding-top: 1em;
    padding-bottom: 1em;
}

But the easiest solution is to simply treat the .title as a block-level element, and using the appropriate heading tags <h1> through <h6>.