For Molnya…

You sent me an email this morning, and I replied, but it immediately bounced back to me. I have no other way of responding to you - and since you sent me your email from my contact form, I’m assuming you visit every now and then.

I’m also going to take this opportunity to use you as an example (hope you don’t mind!)

Molnya emailed me, having an issue with my Orange Crush theme. One page on her site looks odd - the footer is kind of “hanging loose” and not reaching the bottom of the browsers window like all the other pages are. To me, it looked like an unclosed div tag.

Here is where I will give you all a nudge - when you see soemthing weird going on with your site - doesn’t matter if it’s my theme or someone else’s - your first step should be to validate. If you take a look at Molnya’s page using the W3C Validator, it’ll give you a ton of information. When I did this, it immediately proved my initial thought to be true - an unclosed div tag.

So Molnya - your problem is, you’ve inserted a div into your content area for your gallery (the div class is “gallery”). However, you didn’t close it. So what’s happening is that the browser looks for the closing div tag, and the one it’s choosing to use to close your “gallery” tag is my “wrapper” closing tag - and if the wrapper tag isn’t closed, then the footer doesn’t push down.

You either need to remove your “gallery” opening div tag, or add in a closing one to “close the box”. Then your footer will do what it’s supposed to do.

So, for future refrence (to all!) the quickest way to troubleshoot problems is simply to validate your pages. Even if you don’t care about accessibility or end user issues, or whether or not it actually validates - the validator is *key* in oncovering things like this. If something is missing, it’ll tell you. You can still fix that and fix your site without having it completely validate for other reasons. (Although you *should* validate, because not doing so brings about other issues, but I digress.)

Hope that helped you out, Molnya!

Posted by
December 12th, 2006