I know the feeling all too well. Managing cross-platform frontend development has become an incredibly intricate, so much so that anyone who can bend the browser to their will deserves the "great engineer" stamp.
A valid point. I should've been more clear that this question really only makes sense when talking to a frontend dev. I always try to avoid the "varchar2" style question, a phone interview shouldn't be a trivia contest. For a frontend dev the sticky footer question can tell you more about a persons coding style and thought process. A proficient frontend dev would have an opinion about how sticky footer should be done and be able to identify common pitfalls.
I'm still confused though, since the linked jsFiddle uses position:absolute. Clearly that would never work - That's pretty basic html/css wisdom. I would expect position:fixed to do work though, although your post suggest that that might not be the case on all platforms. I guess I wouldn't realise that until I began testing on a broader range of devices than the normal development stack holds.
position: fixed is if you actually want the footer to always be visible, with the main body content scrolling out from under it. To my knowledge, this works across all devices.
The goal of this snippet is to have the footer always below the content, but in the event the content is shorter than the page height, the footer should still be placed at the bottom of the page.
Really Javascript isn't a terrible solution here, since it only needs to be run on load and on window resize (rare events), but the CSS is indeed nifty and worth knowing it exists.
