How can I position my div at the bottom of its container?

Yes you can do this without absolute positioning and without using tables (which screw with markup and such).

DEMO
This is tested to work on IE>7, chrome, FF & is a really easy thing to add to your existing layout.

<div id="container">
    Some content you don't want affected by the "bottom floating" div
    <div>supports not just text</div>

    <div class="foot">
        Some other content you want kept to the bottom
        <div>this is in a div</div>
    </div>
</div>

#container {
    height:100%;
    border-collapse:collapse;
    display : table;
}

.foot {
    display : table-row;
    vertical-align : bottom;
    height : 1px;
}

It effectively does what float:bottom would, even accounting for the issue pointed out in @Rick Reilly's answer!


The flexbox approach!

In supported browsers, you can use the following:

Example Here

.parent {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}
.child {
  margin-top: auto;
}


.parent {
  height: 100px;
  border: 5px solid #000;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}
.child {
  height: 40px;
  width: 100%;
  background: #f00;
  margin-top: auto;
}
<div class="parent">
  <div class="child">Align to the bottom</div>
</div>

The solution above is probably more flexible, however, here is an alternative solution:

Example Here

.parent {
  display: flex;
}
.child {
  align-self: flex-end;
}


.parent {
  height: 100px;
  border: 5px solid #000;
  display: flex;
}
.child {
  height: 40px;
  width: 100%;
  background: #f00;
  align-self: flex-end;
}
<div class="parent">
  <div class="child">Align to the bottom</div>
</div>

As a side note, you may want to add vendor prefixes for additional support.


Actually, the accepted answer by @User will only work if the window is tall and the content is short. But if the content is tall and the window is short, it will put the copyright info over the page content, and then scrolling down to see the content will leave you with a floating copyright notice. That makes this solution useless for most pages (like this page, actually).

The most common way of doing this is the "CSS sticky footer" approach demonstrated, or a slightly slimmer variation. This approach works great -- IF you have a fixed height footer.

If you need a variable height footer that will appear at the bottom of the window if the content is too short, and at the bottom of the content if the window is too short, what do you do?

Swallow your pride and use a table.

For example:

* {
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}

html, body {
    height: 100%;
}

#container {
    height: 100%;
    border-collapse: collapse;
}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
    <table id="container">
        <tr>
            <td valign="top">
                <div id="main">Lorem ipsum, etc.</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td valign="bottom">
                <div id="footer">Copyright some evil company...</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

Try it out. This will work for any window size, for any amount of content, for any size footer, on every browser... even IE6.

If you're cringing at the thought of using a table for layout, take a second to ask yourself why. CSS was supposed to make our lives easier -- and it has, overall -- but the fact is that even after all these years, it's still a broken, counter-intuitive mess. It can't solve every problem. It's incomplete.

Tables aren't cool, but at least for now, they are sometimes the best way to solve a design problem.


Likely not.

Assign position:relative to #container, and then position:absolute; bottom:0; to #copyright.

#container {
    position: relative;
}
#copyright {
    position: absolute;
    bottom: 0;
}
<div id="container">
  <!-- Other elements here -->
  <div id="copyright">
    Copyright Foo web designs
  </div>
</div>

Tags:

Html

Css

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