As you have mentioned, position: fixed
would position the footer with the respect to the viewport rather than the page itself. Therefore, we have to keep the element in normal flow and somehow position it to the bottom of the page.
There are couple of approaches to achieve that, which have been discussed in the wild during the time.
For instance:
- A List Apart‘s article Exploring Footers – by Bobby Van Der Sluis, 2004
- footerStickAlt – by Craig Erskine, 2005
- Sticky Footer – by Shelly Cole, 2006
- How to keep footers at the bottom of the page – by Matthew James Taylor, 2007
- Make the Footer Stick to the Bottom of a Page – by Ryan Fait, 2007
- Refined version of Ryan Fait’s Sticky Footer – by Chris Coyier, 2009
- Sticky CSS footers: The flexible way (which uses CSS Tables) – by Torben Haase, 2011
- Responsive Sticky Footer (refined version of Torben’s approach) – by Joshua Cook, 2013
- Solved by Flexbox‘s Sticky Footer – by Philip Walton, 2013
Sticky Footer
In this answer I’d go with Ryan Fait’s method since it is simple and easy to understand and also it meets your needs (Situations where both header and footer have fixed heights).
Considering the structure below:
<div id="content"> <!-- content goes here. It may (not) include the header --> </div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
The following steps are needed:
-
Setting
height
of the<html>
and<body>
elements to100%
which is required for the next step1. -
The most important thing we need to do is to make sure that the
#content
is high enough to push the#footer
down the page. Hence we give the#content
amin-height
of100%
. -
So far, the
#content
has taken100%
of height of the viewport, thus we should pull the footer up to position it at the bottom of the page. In order to do that we could give the#content
a negativemargin-bottom
equivalent to the footer’sheight
. Also to make sure that the footer appears on top of the content, we shouldposition
the footerrelative
ly. Demo Here. -
As can be seen, when the
#content
grows by its contents, some of the contents go behind the footer. We could avoid that either by appending a spacer element at the end of#content
or use the combination ofpadding-bottom
andbox-sizing: border-box
2 which is supposed to be supported on IE8 as well.
4.1 Adding a spacer
<div id="content">
<!-- content goes here -->
<div class="spacer"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
.spacer, #footer { height: 100px; }
4.2 Combination of padding-bottom
and box-sizing
#content {
min-height: 100%;
margin-bottom: -100px; /* Equivalent to footer's height */
padding-bottom: 100px; /* Equivalent to footer's height */
box-sizing: border-box;
}
(Note that vendor prefixes omitted due to brevity)
Adding the Header
-
If the header should remain in normal flow, you could simply add it to the
#content
as follows:
(Example Here)<div id="content"> <div id="header">Header</div> ...
-
But if it should be positioned absolutely3, we need to push the contents of
#content
element down in order to prevent overlapping.
Therefore, again, we could either add a spacer at the beginning of #content
(Example Here):
<div id="header">Header</div>
<div id="content">
<div class="header-spacer"></div>
<!-- content goes here -->
<div class="footer-spacer"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
Or use the combination of padding-top
and box-sizing
as follows:
<div id="header">Header</div>
<div id="content"> <!-- content goes here. --> </div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
#content {
min-height: 100%;
margin-bottom: -100px; /* Equivalent to footer's height */
padding-top : 50px; /* Equivalent to header's height */
padding-bottom: 100px; /* Equivalent to footer's height */
box-sizing: border-box;
}
Updated Example (Note that vendor prefixes omitted due to brevity)
At last but not least!
Nowadays, All major modern web browsers support box-sizing: border-box
declaration (including IE8). However if you’re looking for the traditional way which has a wider browser support, stick with using spacer elements.
1. This is needed to make min-height: 100%
to work on the #content
element (because a percentage value is relative to the height
of the box’s containing block which is established by the <body>
). Also <html>
should have an explicit height
to make height: 100%
to work on <body>
.
2. box-sizing: border-box
makes UAs calculate the width
/height
of the box including padding and borders.
3. According to spec, absolutely positioned elements are elements having a position
of absolute
or fixed
.