Friday, October 21, 2011

Sticky Footer & Variable Height - modern CSS

Copy & Pasted from http://pixelsvsbytes.com/blog/2011/09/sticky-footers-the-flexible-way/ Page was down for me, so salvaged this from Bing search cache (Google cache didn't have):

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Step 3: All we have to do now is to put our CSS and HTML code together. Fortunately we can use the body element as .Frame, so there is no need for an extra div tag or so.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
    <style type="text/css">
        html, body {
             height: 100%;
             margin: 0pt;
        }
        .Frame {
             display: table;
             height: 100%;
             width: 100%;
        }
        .Row {
             display: table-row;
        }
        .Row.Expand {
             height: 100%;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body class="Frame">
    <header class="Row"><h1>Catchy header</h1></header>
    <section class="Row Expand"><h2>Awesome content</h2></section>
    <footer class="Row"><h3>Sticky footer</h3></footer>
</body>
</html>

Note: Remember to include the html5shiv workaround in your page (and define appropriate CSS styles) if you want to use HTML5 tags in IE8 and below. Or simply use div tags instead of header, section and footer.

A word on older browsers

The code above will work even with older versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari, so there is nothing to worry about here, but unfortunately Internet Explorer 7 and below don’t know anything about display:table or display:table-row, so we go the way of graceful degradation here.

The first thing we have to to is, to prevent the margins of elements inside the row from being outside of it, by adding overflow:hidden to the .Row style.

That gives us quite acceptable results, but the footer will always be outside of the window due to the 100% height of the .Frame and the .Row. The solution is to set height:100% in a way that all Internet Explorer versions below 8 won’t recognize. I’m using the (valid) html>/**/body CSS hack to accomplish this, but you might also use conditional comments if you feel better that way. However, here is the fixed CSS:

.Frame {
    display: table;
    width: 100%;
}
html>/**/body .Frame {
    height: 100%;
}
.Row {
    display: table-row;
    overflow: hidden;
}
html>/**/body .Row.Expand {
    height: 100%;
}

I guess it shouldn’t be too complicated to create a sticky footer by adjusting the height of .Row.Expand with some little Javascript.

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