Andy Chase

...Plus c'est le meme chose.

Exploring Footers: A List Apart is another installment in the sisyphean struggle to implement cross-browser, 100% W3C standards-compliant web pages laid out using CSS instead of tried and true table layout.

I'm usually not on the bleeding edge when it comes to this stuff... I scoffed at CSS for a long time in the days where you still had to design for Netscape 4.x; support was so piss-poor that it just wasn't worth it, and when you needed to change a font color there was always TextPad's find/replace across multiple documents. My portfolio site is XHTML and CSS compliant, but this weblog is probably not remotely valid due to my recycling of older entries with unterminated <br> tags and such.

In early 2004, CSS support is worlds better across all of the major browsers, but it still seems to be lacking when it comes to styles that deal with the height of things, as in "This div should expand to fill 100% the height of its container, so I can position this footer block at the bottom"

The article brings back those nightmare days of JavaScript browser-sniffing and nesting 8 tables one inside another to make that one transparent pixel .GIF line up just so.

You know what? As long as you're not nesting them by the dozen, table layouts are just fine. I would argue that if you absolutely must have a footer that remains always at the bottom of the window, it's less evil to use a simple layout table than it is to resort to JavaScript to make a div stay where you want it to.