CSS content-visibility

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The CSS language is full of small gaps which are frustrating to navigate. Between CSS properties to hide a container and its contents, there is still room for improvement. visibility: hidden keeps height and width integrity while display: none on a container hides everything. You can use .container > * to hide all contents of a container, but what if there was a better way?

There is a better way to hide the contents of an element while respecting the container's border and dimensions. That better way is using the content-visibility property:

.my-container.contents-loading {
  content-visibility: hidden;
}

A demo of such functionality:

See the Pen Untitled by David Walsh (@darkwing) on CodePen.

Avoiding a .container > * selector by using content-visibility: hidden is so much nicer from a maintenance perspective!

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Discussion

  1. Chris Zuber

    I’ve found that it can cause accessibility issues and false problems in Lighthouse reports. But that’s content-visibility: auto.

    For example, I have large white text on a black background in a footer, but I think Chrome doesn’t properly test/paint it/something because it says all text has insufficient contrast ratio (it has a ratio of like 12). Screen readers also seem to be problematic, though I can’t say exactly what’s going on there.

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