Is there a way to get a web page header/footer printed on every page?

Question

Based on my research, it seems that what I want to do is not possible, but in case something has changed, I wanted to check to see if anyone had come up with a way to do thi

Answer 1

It can be done with tables -- and I know I'm going to risk a downvote by suggesting using tables for layout - but we are talking IE6 here which isn't known for its fantastic CSS support :-)

If you set a CSS style as follows:

thead { display: table-header-group; }
tfoot { display: table-footer-group; }

Then when you create your HTML, render your body as:

   
Your header goes here
   
Your footer goes here
   

     

     Page body in here -- as long as it needs to be
     
   

Yes it's not good (tables vs CSS), it's not ideal, but (importantly for you) it does work on IE6. I can't comment on Firefox as I've not tested it there, but it should do the job. This will also handle differnt sized pages, differing font sizes, etc. so it should "just work".

If you want the header and footer to appear on printed media only, then use the @media parameters to do the right thing:

@media print {
    thead { display: table-header-group; }
    tfoot { display: table-footer-group; }
}
@media screen {
    thead { display: none; }
    tfoot { display: none; }
}

Note
As of July 2015, this will still only work in Firefox and IE. Webkit-based browsers (cf. Chrome, Safari) have long standing bugs in their issue trackers about this if anyone feels strongly enough to vote on them:

The comments below this question tell me this is now resolved in Chrome. I haven't checked myself :-)

The original bugs against Chrome (for reference) are:

• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17205
• https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=24826
• https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99124