Update: I’ve developed the idea of this article a bit further to a simple CSS based layout grid, which also includes flexible columns and some other improvements. However, this article is still worth reading to get a basic idea of how the flexible footer works.
A CSS sticky footer is an area, that stays at the window bottom if there is not enough content to fill the complete window height, but stays below the content if its height exceeds the window height. There are several ways how to achieve this circulating in the web, but they all have some flaws: Most of them (e.g. CSSStickyFooter) require a fixed height footer and the only flexible solution I’ve found needs jQuery. However, here is an easy and plain CSS solution for sticky footers with fluid height that works perfectly with IE8+, FF2+, Chrome9+, Safari3+ and Opera 8+ (probably more) and returns acceptable results in IE7 and IE6.
For those of you, who don’t care about big explanations, I’ve made a simple example page and a bit more complex one to show you how it will look like. You can check out the code (it’s quite simple) in your browser or download everything as an ZIP archive or read on, if you want to know all the details.
Continue reading Sticky CSS footers: The flexible way