Basically you need to give the footer a fixed height and to push the footer with another div of the same height to the bottom. There's however more browser specific stuff which you need to take into account:
- The
html and body must besides having a height of 100% no (default) margin to avoid the footer being pushed further to below that amount of margin.
- The
p and div elements throughout the page must have no margin-top to avoid the footer being pushed further to below that amount of top-margins in under each Firefox.
- The "container"
div must use min-height of 100% instead of height to avoid the footer to overlap the remaining of the content. IE6 which doesn't know min-height just works fine with height, so you'll need to add a * html hack for this.
All with all, here's an SSCCE, just copy'n'paste'n'run it:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">
<title>SO question 1900813</title>
<style>
html, body {
margin: 0;
height: 100%;
}
p, div {
margin-top: 0; /* Fix margin collapsing behaviour in FF. Use padding-top if necessary. */
}
#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
}
* html #container {
height: 100%; /* This is actually "min-height" for IE6 and older. */
}
#pushfooter {
height: 50px; /* Must be the same as footer height. */
}
#footer {
position: absolute;
bottom: 0;
height: 50px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<p>Some content</p>
<div id="pushfooter"></div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Edit: after more testing I realized that this indeed does not work in IE8 (I still consider it as a beta so I didn't really use/test it, sorry about that), unless you let it render in IE7 compatibility modus (insert sad smilie here) by adding the following meta tag to the <head> (which I already added to the SSCCE here above):
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">
or to let it render in quirks mode by using a "wrong" doctype (either remove the <!doctype> or pick one of the doctypes associated with painfully red Q boxes in IE here). But I wouldn't do that, that has more negative side-effects as well.
And, surprisingly, the http://www.cssstickyfooter.com site as someone else here mentioned here which used an entirely different approach also did not work in IE8 here (try to resize browser window in y-axis, the footer won't move along it as opposed to other browsers, including IE6/7). That browser keeps astonishing me. Really.