4 Column Footer in CSS - html

Question

I'm developing a 4 column footer in CSS, but after wrestling with this for a few hours there are two things that I cannot achieve.
1) Replicating the padding of the first column in the three subsequent columns
2) Extending the vertical border the entire 250px.
Does anyone have any ideas? Here is my code
http://jsfiddle.net/FdHAR/

Answer 1

The best thing to do here is to add a class, possibly footer-column, that you apply to each of the divs. Then put those four divs in a div with the class footer. Your structure would look something like this:
<div class="footer">
<div class="footer-column" id="footer_column1">...</div>
<div class="footer-column" id="footer_column2">...</div>
<div class="footer-column" id="footer_column3">...</div>
<div class="footer-column" id="footer_column4">...</div>
</div>
Obviously, we need to change the styles foor this to look right.
Padding
Let's address the padding first: all you really have to do is select the class and put some padding-left and padding-right on it. It will automatically apply the same padding to each one that way. Also, to make them appear side-by-side, we need to float them. Something like this will do:
.footer-column {
float: left; // Push the div as far up-left as it can be put
width: 25%; // Make sure to subtract the padding
padding: 10px; // We want padding on all sides to make things look nice
}
Now that that's done, let's fix the borders.
Vertical Borders
This is a bit more difficult, unless you know the overall height of the footer. Either way, we can use the CSS selector :first-child to apply the borders. This should do it:
.footer-column {
...
border-left: 1px solid black; // Whatever border you want goes here.
}
.footer-column:first-child {
border-left: none;
}
If you know the height of the footer, you can force that height, and the border will work just fine.
.footer-column {
...
height: 250px; // Force the box to be 250px tall
}
If you don't know the height of the footer, you'll have to use some other styling and possible javascript. But I'll assume you do since you stated a specific value in the question.

Answer 2

You want to use display: table and display: table-cell: http://jsfiddle.net/FdHAR/3/

Answer 3

1) Add
padding-left: 15px;
to #col2,3,4 moves the text off of the vertical white bar. You may need to play with the value to get the exact spacing you're looking for.
2) add height: 250px; to #container4 to make it the right size.
Caveats: this is after a few minutes of adjusting on safari -- your browser may vary...

Answer 4

Played with this a bit, I think this is closer to what you want and should work well across browsers. I'd recommend a fixed width or a min-width on the footer (<footer> is html5).
jsFiddle
Some constructive feedback:
Try to combine your styles as much as possible. No need to re-write and re-set padding, etc across similar elements.
You had div, inside div, yet were treating them like columns. A simpler approach is to use a list and think of each list item as a column. If you wanted to do divs, then don't put them inside each other.
I like to use em for setting font-size or line-height, but use px for anything else. (personal preference, makes sense since it's a screen you're usually working for)
Try to set only 1 or 2 specific strict sizes and then use percentages of that. A good thought is setting the footer font-size to 1.2em, then the h1 could be font-size 130% and smaller could be 80%. This also works well for width, etc. (each column is 25% of the parent).
a jsFiddle hint, you don't need to put the whole html doc there, just the part you want to fiddle with, same for css and jquery drop the ,.