[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I tend to just have my header and footer in two separate views, passing variables to them for meta data, title, css files etc.
An example could be:
$data = array(
'title' => 'Title',
'meta_keywords' => 'Keywords, go, here',
'meta_desc' => 'Description is here',
'css' => 'css.css',
'js' => 'js.js'
);
$this->load->view('page_head', $data);
$this->load->view('index');
$this->load->view('page_foot');