CSS content-visibility

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Save Web Form Content Using Control + S

    We've all used word processing applications like Microsoft Word and if there's one thing they've taught you it's that you need to save every few seconds in anticipation of the inevitable crash. WordPress has mimicked this functionality within their WYSIWYG editor and I use it...

  • By
    Display Images as Grayscale with CSS Filters

    CSS filters aren't yet widely supported but they are indeed impressive and a modern need for web imagery.  CSS filters allow you to modify the display of images in a variety of ways, one of those ways being displaying images as grayscale. Doing so requires the...

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.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!