Re: xhtml and footers [modified] - Web Development Discussion Boards

I'm sure this question has been asked a million times, but it's new to me since I haven't done any web development lately.

Anyway, does anyone know of a good CSS compliant way of having a real footer (ie, doesn't overlap the content) on a web page that works on all browsers including Opera?

On Firefox using divs makes the document overlap and using tables don't seem to do anything at all. I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur here.

And, I just have to get this off my chest. Laugh | :laugh:

This used to be so easy in HTML. Sure, there wasn't standardized way, but it worked in all browsers minus a few quirks. This XHTML thing seems to be a case one step forward and two steps back.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Hey Jeremy,
There are a couple of ways to do this. It really depends on how the page is structured. If you have a page that just flows (like standard html) then you simple place a div at the base of the document containing the footers.

This works fine for basic layouts, but other times you are going to need to have it positioned as part of the layout. The next method applies if you are using the "position:absolute" (or its subs) css... thing. You have to build the footer into the page. This can be really annoying but you have to position the rest of your divs so that they take into account that the footer is there. (Just btw to position something on the bottom use this: "position:absolute; bottom:0px;").

There are many other ways of doing this, but without seeing how you structure your code I could only offer abstract advice.

And as for your remarks about Xhtml, it is not the problem we are all facing. The main difference we face with Xhtml is that we have to be more careful with nested tags. CSS is the real problem as we are not able to create a single style sheet that is cross browser without spending many hours testing and using obscure hacks that mean we have to go back next time a browser is released and completely re-write that back of the sheet.

Web development has hit a dark patch as standardization is far from being obtained, and people still continue to use older browsers that we have to compensate for.

The only way standardization will be achieved is if web masters decide to shun no compliant agents (which will never happen). So I've been toying with a new web protocol that will serve exclusively to compliant agents (not that it will ever take off).

Ok well I hope that the answer to your question is somewhere in there,

Regards,
Brad

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

Howdy.

The problem I faced with absolute positioning is it will overlap the other divs when the browser is resized small enough. Also, the main reason I say it's XHTML that's driving me crazy is that it enforces the rule about not caring for the height attrib to a table whereas in HTML you could take advantage of that if CSS wasn't playing fair.

Anywho, seeing that I speak HTML better than XHTML, lemme show you the layout I'm going for with the old school way of things...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<body leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" rightmargin="0" bottommargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
	<table width="100%" height="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="1">
		<tr>
			<td>1</td>
			<td>2</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>3</td>
			<td>4</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td colspan="2" valign="bottom">5</td>
		</tr>
	</table>
</body>
</html>

Basically I always want cell 5 to act as the footer on the bottom but also have it never overlap. TIA btw.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Also, the main reason I say it's XHTML that's driving me crazy is that it enforces the rule about not caring for the height attrib to a table whereas in HTML you could take advantage of that if CSS wasn't playing fair.

The table tag doesn't have a height attribute at all, it never has and it never will. It's only Internet Explorer that thinks that it has.

The reason that Internet Explorer ignores the heigth attribute when you are using XHTML, is that then it tries to follow the standards and treats it correctly.

---
It's amazing to see how much work some people will go through just to avoid a little bit of work.

Guffa wrote:
The table tag doesn't have a height attribute at all, it never has and it never will. It's only Internet Explorer that thinks that it has.

I never said it was. For that matter, every browser in the world still reads the height attribute for tables in quirk-mode for HTML rendering, this is not just for IE. My point was XHTML is more strict and thus it won't allow it but you always could in HTML even if it wasn't a standard. The only real problem was the calculations different browsers used to determine the final height.

Guffa wrote:
The reason that Internet Explorer ignores the heigth attribute when you are using XHTML, is that then it tries to follow the standards and treats it correctly.

Thanks for the reply, but I think most people that can get past "beginner's XHTML" already know this.

When standardizing XHTML, the geniuses behind it should've realized HTML was never used for what it was intended by the time it got popular. Its usage evolved and as such, core functionality should have done so too. Instead, when making a standard they take something that used to be simple and wipe it away - never mind the fact that CSS can really suck at times when it comes to positioning and compatibility.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Going back to your layout problem, could you post your current source so I could play around with it and see if I can get what you want?

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

What I have is based on this:

http://scott.sauyet.com/CSS/Demo/FooterDemo1.html[^]

One thing I've noticed that in FF now there's padding at the top with this "solution" (set on purpose) but once it's removed then the footer starts acting weird. If you figure something out that would be awesome, but of course I'd like to know why your changes work, etc. Ya know me, I want to learn from it. Wink | ;)

I just don't see how something as simple as a footer was overlooked when setting a new standard. D'Oh! | :doh:

TIA btw man.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Hey Jeremy.

I'm sorry for the lateness of this reply but I have been flat out the past couple days.

Anyway I took a look and the page there and quickly reconstucted it so i could make sure i knew exactly what it was doing (PS. The footer breaks in Dreamweaver!).

Ok here is the CSS:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
/*This will make sure that the entire window space is utilized. 
Without it the footer would not take up the entire width and would not be at the base of the document. */

html, body, #container {
	min-height: 100%;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
}

/*This is hack to stop firefox from displaying a scroll bar. 
IE 5 for Windows will not read this because of the "html>body" thing. */
html>body, html>body #container{
height:auto;
}

/*Formating and removing margins*/
body{
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
margin:0;
}

/*Setting the page containers start position (This container takes up the entire document) */
#container{
position:absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;

}

/*The footer is placed at the bottom left with a width of 100%. 
I have not used the box model hack because I have removed its borders and padding. */
#footer{
position:absolute;
left:0px;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
background-color:#FFFF00;

border:0px;
padding:0px;
}

/*The "margin-bottom:" stops the document from becoming small enough for an overlap to occur. 
Note that if you have multiple lines you may have to increase this. */
#content{
margin-bottom: 4em; 
height: auto;
padding: .5em;
}

/*and that is that*/
-->
</style>

So that is pretty much how that all works...

This page is an example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Page with Footer!</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
html, body, #container {
	min-height: 100%;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
}


html>body, html>body #container{
height:auto;
}

body{
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
margin:0;
}
#container{
position:absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;

}

#footer{
position:absolute;
left:0px;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
background-color:#FFFF00;
border-top:2em;
height:auto;
}
#content{
margin-bottom: 4em; 
height: auto;
padding: .5em;
}

-->
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div id="container">
<div id="content">
This is page content.
It could contain many many many lines of code!
<br />
This is even more content!<br />
And so is this!!
</div>
	
<div id="footer">
This is a footer!!! <i>Brads amazing facts #451254</i>
<br />
More!!
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I wonder if I should consider writing an article on this sort of thing....
What do you think?

-- modified at 11:46 Monday 18th December, 2006

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

Bradml wrote:
I'm sorry for the lateness of this reply but I have been flat out the past couple days.

Now you're gonna make me feel guilty. Laugh | :laugh:

I understand people gotta have a life. I'm just glad for the free help. No worries man.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Grrr. I have a new mouse with all these weird buttons that apparently submitted my other post too soon. D'Oh! | :doh:

Anyway...

Bradml wrote:
This page is an example:

I opened your example up on FF 2.0 (Windows) and the footer still wasn't at the bottom of the page.

Bradml wrote:
I wonder if I should consider writing an article on this sort of thing....
What do you think?

I think it would be useful if we found something that works. After searching Google forever, there's a lot of people wondering the same thing as I - that I've seen anyway.

Most of the solutions I've run across never worked for all major browsers.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

I tested in ff2.

Let me double check the source.

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

No I checked again and it definitely worked.

Did you copy ALL the source for that page?
especially:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

If that doesn't work then take a screen shot of what it looks like and send it to me by email.

Also include:
Screen shot of the help>about Mozilla Firefox
and a complete copy of the source you are using in a text file.

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

I think we have a misunderstanding here. Let me try and be more clear about what I mean.

I'm looking for a footer that's always at the bottom of the viewport, not the document. That is to say, if there's not a lot of data/content on the page it will still be at the bottom. The version you sent me only keeps the footer at the bottom if the document contains a lot of data.

I can send you a mock-up of what I'm talking about if you want. Maybe that's the best way to make sure we're talking apples to apples.

Thanks again.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Oh, and even though the footer is at the bottom of the viewport, I don't ever want it to overlap content on the website.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

Thanks Brad, that gives me an idea how to solve a problem I'm having.

I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:

No problem mate, but how did you stumble apon that post? it is ancient.

Brad
Australian

- Christian Graus on "Best books for VBscript"

A big thick one, so you can whack yourself on the head with it.

Bradml wrote:
but how did you stumble apon that post?

It's this strange thing called searching, yea I know weird eh? I knew the answer was out there in the great intermess. Just a matter of finding it (and learning to work with CP search functionality).

I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:

I don't know why I made the assumption you were using tableless design when I suggested using "clear both". I don't know if it works inside tables.

Try using the [tfoot] tag insteaad of [tr][td] for your footer information.

I'm on-line therefore I am.

JimmyRopes

JimmyRopes wrote:
I don't know why I made the assumption you were using tableless design when I suggested using "clear both". I don't know if it works inside tables.

I don't have to use tables, I was just showing the layout I was after using the old school way. If I can get a footer that doesn't overlap and works in all or most major browsers I'll be happy to dump tables and HTML.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]

try "clear: both;"

as in [div styles="clear: both;" /]

I'm on-line therefore I am.

JimmyRopes

That's only with floats

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

Bradml wrote:
That's only with floats

Isn't that what he is talking about; floating elements?

I'm on-line therefore I am.

JimmyRopes

with absolute position....

Brad
Australian

"Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!" - peterchen

Ask Jeremy! It was just a suggestion.

I'm on-line therefore I am.

JimmyRopes

In the end I just want a footer that doesn't overlap. I don't really care how it's implemented as long as its supported by most major browsers. TIA btw.

Jeremy Falcon
"It's a good thing to do and a tasty way to do it." - Wilford Brimley[^]