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
    Duplicate DeSandro’s CSS Effect

    I recently stumbled upon David DeSandro's website when I saw a tweet stating that someone had stolen/hotlinked his website design and code, and he decided to do the only logical thing to retaliate:  use some simple JavaScript goodness to inject unicorns into their page.

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

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!