In the early years of the web I actually threw in a raft of <br> tags at the bottom of my webpages just to counteract this problem---I've been complaining about

In the early years of the web I actually threw in a raft of <br> tags at the bottom of my webpages just to counteract this problem---I've been complaining about it for upwards of fifteen years. My current solution is to put a "padding-bottom: 5in" in my #footer element, which is marginally cleaner, but of course it's specific to websites that I control....