Uh oh, we have another problem

As you were test driving the page you might have noticed a little problem. If you resize the browser to a wide position, the footer comes up underneath the sidebar. Why? Well, remember, the sidebar is not in the flow, so the footer pretty much ignores it, and when the content area is too short, the footer moves right up. We could use the same margin trick on the footer, but then the footer would only be under the content area, not the whole page. So, what now?

This is another solution that sounds good... until you try it.

The problem with setting a width on both the content area and the sidebar is that this doesn’t allow the page to expand and contract correctly because both have fixed widths. Check the screen-shots below that show how it works (or rather, doesn’t work).