Also of note, footer can be for the article or the whole page. If you like, you can put footer outside the article and put the site-wide navigation there in addition to any forms.
Skip to content links aren't hacks, but are in fact part of standard procedure for web accessibility and do solve a problem with fewer steps. Try not to look at things that don't necessarily conform to arbitrary standards of elegance as hacks.
And what comes to skip to content -links, those definetly are hacks. What they mean is "Dear user, we would have put the content first in the source, but since CSS is not a layout definition language, it was not possible, take this link instead."
I haven't figured out how to do this with responsive layouts. It's never worked well for me but I will come up with a solution one day.
And those skip to content -links just the kind of hack we should not have to do. There should not be anyhting before the content, markup-wise.