To beat footers to the bottom?

Recently, a dispute broke out at work. Pretty serious. We are now engaged in one very large social project, on which two designers are working, one of which is me. But the question was not quite on design, but on html layout. They argued about whether it is necessary and possible to nail the footer to the bottom of the page, regardless of the amount of information, or let it float? On the vast majority of pages, the footer floats, and if the information on the page is small, it rises up.



Personally, I am opposed to such a decision. In most cases, the footer contains background information, which in principle should not attract much attention. And on large monitors with a small amount of information on the page, the footer flies up, settling down almost to the center of the screen. Thus, unimportant information gets an extra accent and brings a bit of porridge, mixing with the basic information in this section. And it looks especially disgusting if the footer has some kind of own background that is different from the general background of the page. In fact, the footer becomes, almost the main unit on the page, as it occupies half of the screen, and is clearly separated from the rest of the background.



I believe that in most cases the footer should be given a fixed size in height and nailed to the very bottom of the browser window. Although it strongly depends on the design.



My colleague has a totally opposite opinion. He believes that the footer should float regardless of the circumstances. At the same time, he refers to the fact that: everyone does this; so does Lebedev; This is according to W3C standards.

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So the question is, do the standards of the element logic itself contradict in this case? After all, standards should go to the benefit of the designer, and not against. That is, following the standards, I should only make those footers that will look adequate, provided that they begin to swim and grow in size. And if I planned a fixed footer with a contrasting fill (as in these cases: www.free-lance.ru/users/raga/viewproj.php?prjid=161441 , www.free-lance.ru/users/raga/viewproj.php ? prjid = 67262 ) to solve the composition, for example?



In fact, it turns out that, in this case, the standards of the layout are a completely unnecessary restriction for the designer. The designer should be able to translate the element in the form in which he conceived it. And in this case, I do not see any technological limitations for this.



We didn’t come to a common opinion in the team, and the bosses took the “all the way we do” way.



And I was interested in the opinion of the community on this issue. Very desirable with arguments.