How do I Achieve this layout without fighting CSS - css

Question

I understand that there are several questions here about this problem, but I have a rather unique predicament. I'm working on a template that has to include certain tags, and has to work with other elements that are added to the template after I upload the code. I wouldn't worry about this, but I am having a time trying to get the footer to display at the bottom of the page. I can't alter anything about the footer, and it displays at the bottom of the div I'm using as a wrapper. The problem is if I set the height to a fixed value, there can only be so many comments made before the comment div overlaps the footer. I've tried several different solutions including setting the container div's height to auto, overflow to auto, bottom margin to 65 (height of the footer), and setting the overflow to scroll for the Comments div (resulted in very loose comments).
Here is an example of the problem and the template as it stands.
Here is the CSS styling for the container div (div id=Main)
#Main {
margin: 0px auto auto auto;
background-color: #808080;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size: medium;
font-variant: normal;
color: #FFFFFF;
width: 900px;
position: relative;
}
Here's the CSS styling for the Comments div
#Comments {
background-color: #008080;
width: 450px;
height: auto;
top: 1750px;
left: 450px;
position: absolute;
overflow: auto;
}
And here's how the divs are stacked in the body
<div id="Main">
...
<div id="Comment_Form">
<!--[COMMENT_FORM=400,200]-->
</div>
<div id="Comments">
<!--[COMMENTS=400]-->
Comments
</div>
</div>
Since the page is going to be image heavy, I'm trying to keep the code lightweight (and probably failing at it pretty badly).
Thank you for your help and I'll post the template as of now if anyone needs it.
EDIT:
Okay, it's occurred to me that a) I need to redo the CSS and the divs that I have down, and b) I have no clue how to do it using pure CSS, or at least with out fighting it as one of you has said. What I'm trying to achieve is this:
I have no clue How to do this. and any help would be greatly appreciated (as well as any way to avoid having each and every element in its own div)

Answer 1

You seem to be really fighting your CSS on that page. Most of your elements are positioned absolutely within your #Main class. This will force you to specify a lot more layout than you really want to. It also means that if you have a variable quantity of comments or dynamic content, you'll find it that much harder to expand your content containers without others getting in the way.
I would strongly urge you to look at CSS frameworks or approaches that take advantage of grid layouts such as Nicole Sullivan's OOCSS framework.
You'll find that the structure (which has plenty of good, workable examples) is easy to follow and lends itself much more readily to the sorts of layouts that you're trying to achieve.

Answer 2

I hope this is helpful.
Here is a very basic layout that you can use.
In your CSS:
#header, #content, #comments{
margin: 0 auto;
width: 960px;
overflow: hidden;
}
#author-comments{
width: 100%;
}
#comment-box{
float: left;
width: 50%;
}
#comment-list{
float: right;
width: 50%;
}
In your markup:
<div id="header">
Header
</div>
<div id="content">
Contents
<div>
<div id="comments">
<div id="author-comments">
Author comments
</div>
<div id="comment-box">
Comment box
</div>
<div id="comment-list">
Comment list
</div>
</div>
It's really important that you use markup that makes sense without the styles. Don't see divs as plain boxes but as actual content containers that give structure to your document.
On a side note, you mentioned that you were concerned about the ammount of divs to keep your file light, compensating for the amount of images you're using. Don't worry about this. Text documents (such as HTML) are nothing compared to images in terms of file size. However, his doesn't mean you should throw markup as if it was free ;)
One last thing. I noticed that you are using <img> elements to render your decoration images. Try using CSS to set them as background images in the corresponding <div>s. This not only will help you to make cleaner and easier to implement structures, but also will draw a line between the images that represent content and those that represent decoration.

Answer 3

I'll write without any testing how I would code the layout on your image:
HTML:
<div id="header" class="centered"></div>
<div id="content" class="centered">
<div id="navigation"></div>
<div id="content"></div>
</div>
<div id="comments" class="centered">
<div id="author-comments" class="centered"></div>
<div class="centered">
<div id="comment-field"></div>
<div id="user-comments"></div>
</div>
</div>
CSS:
* { margin:0px; padding:0px }
html { height:100% }
body { height:100% }
.centered { position:relative; margin:0 auto; width:960px }
#header { height:100px; background:#333 }
#content { overflow:hidden }
#author-comment { overflow:hidden; margin:30px auto }
#comment-field { position:relative; float:left; width:480px; overflow:hidden }
#user-comments { position:relative; float:left; width:480px; overflow:hidden }
Sorry, got no time to test now, but on first view, I don't see any problems with this code - write comments, if something doesn't work