Position: absolute and parent height?

Here is my workaround,
In your example you can add a third element with "same styles" of .one & .two elements, but without the absolute position and with hidden visibility:

HTML

<article>
   <div class="one"></div>
   <div class="two"></div>
   <div class="three"></div>
</article>

CSS

.three{
    height: 30px;
    z-index: -1;
    visibility: hidden;
    width:0!important; /* if you got unnecessary horizontal scroll*/
}

2022 UPDATE. This answer is nearly 10 years old. When it was written we didn't have layout technologies like Flex or Grid available (they were dark, hacky/fun times).

Thankfully things have massively improved. Jöcker's answer shows you how to achieve this layout with Grid. If you can live with not supporting legacy browsers, do that instead!

---

Original Answer

If I understand what you're trying to do correctly, then I don't think this is possible with CSS while keeping the children absolutely positioned.

Absolutely positioned elements are completely removed from the document flow, and thus their dimensions cannot alter the dimensions of their parents.

If you really had to achieve this affect while keeping the children as position: absolute, you could do so with JavaScript by finding the height of the absolutely positioned children after they have rendered, and using that to set the height of the parent.

Alternatively, just use float: left/float:right and margins to get the same positioning effect while keeping the children in the document flow, you can then use overflow: hidden on the parent (or any other clearfix technique) to cause its height to expand to that of its children.

article {
    position: relative;
    overflow: hidden;
}

.one {
    position: relative;
    float: left;
    margin-top: 10px;
    margin-left: 10px;
    background: red;
    width: 30px;
    height: 30px;
}

.two {
    position: relative;
    float: right;
    margin-top: 10px;
    margin-right: 10px;
    background: blue;
    width: 30px;
    height: 30px;
}

You can do that with a grid:

article {
    display: grid;
}

.one {
    grid-area: 1 / 1 / 2 / 2;
}

.two {
    grid-area: 1 / 1 / 2 / 2;
}