Thursday, February 17, 2011

Make the Footer Stick to the Bottom of a Page

There are several ways to make a footer stick to the bottom of a page using CSS. But until now, they've used long and messy hacks or a lot of extra HTML markup; this method uses only 15 lines of CSS and hardly any HTML markup. Even better, it's completely valid CSS, and it works in all major browsers. Internet Explorer 5 and up, Firefox, Safari, Opera and more.

Add the following lines of CSS to your stylesheet. The negative value for the margin in .wrapper is the same number as the height of .footer and .push. The negative margin should always equal to the full height of the footer (including any padding or borders you may add).


* {
margin: 0;
}
html, body {
height: 100%;
}
.wrapper {
min-height: 100%;
height: auto !important;
height: 100%;
margin: 0 auto -4em;
}
.footer, .push {
height: 4em;
}

Follow this HTML structure. No content can be outside of the .wrapper and .footer div tags unless it is absolutely positioned with CSS.

<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="layout.css" ... />
</head>
<body>
<div class="wrapper">
<p>Your website content here.</p>
<div class="push"></div>
</div>
<div class="footer">
<p>Copyright (c) 2008</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>