CSS content-visibility
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!
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.