Well, I tinkered a bit with a journal entry display page and found that without having to suggest the flavor-of-the-month web design mantra of "replace table layout with CSS only",  just a few CSS tweaks can enable exactly what I am desiring.

For your consideration, here are the tweaks I made to get a fixed header and footer section with a scrollable journal entry section in the middle:

1. moved the journal entry content and footer line (elog version info) out of the layout table structure, into their own div sections;
2. in the style sheet, added attribute "position:fixed" to the "frame table" section;
3. in the style sheet, added attribute sections for journal entry content and footer div sections:
   1. #content: overflow:auto;position:fixed;top:230px;bottom:30px;width:100%;
   2. #footer:  text-align:center;bottom:0;position:fixed;width:100%;

Now as I'm not a web designer by trade and not intimately familiar with CSS nuances, I used the time honored method of documentation lookup with trial and error.

In any case, it worked and displays exactly the way I wanted; please do consider this for a future elog release.