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Paweł Kowalski for platformOS

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Hide webpage elements, natively

This post is inspired by "How to hide Web page elements" where Habdul Hazeez shown a lot of techniques of hiding elements on your website.

I want to share the solution I have been using in the past years. I like low-tech, native solutions to everything (Commandment 2: You shall always try to use native features before you reimplement them in JavaScript.) and I believe this is the best solution to that problem.

hidden attribute

It is called hidden attribute. This code:

<p>I'm visible</p>

<p hidden>
  I'm invisble!
</p>

<p>I'm visible too</p>
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Results in:

Result

Paragraph marked as hidden is invisible.

See live demo on JSFiddle

In my opinion, this is the best way to hide elements because:

  1. It is native
  2. It does not require CSS by default **
  3. It is hidden from screen readers because it is native
  4. It is supported by all browsers

** display property in CSS overrides hidden attribute, so I usually add this little CSS snippet:

[hidden] { display: none; }
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in default styles to fix that issue.

Read more on the hidden attribute on MDN.

Read more

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