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Cover image for JS: Finally discover how to Hide and Show elements
Lorenzo
Lorenzo

Posted on • Updated on

JS: Finally discover how to Hide and Show elements

Hello World! New episode of the series - A CSS/JS trick in 5 minutes - Last Article was about a CSS background that can really change your websites.
Today I want to explain you a Javascript trick: How to hide and show elements.

Check this!


We have a special property to change visibility of an element. Set visibility. We just have to call object.style.visibility. The property is supported in all browsers.

Show

object.style.visibility = "visible"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Visible is the default property.

Hide

object.style.visibility = "hidden"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Other values

object.style.visibility = "visible|hidden|collapse|initial|inherit"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

image


Parentheses about Display property:

You might get confused about visibility:hidden and display:none.

The visibility property allows the author to show or hide an element. It is similar to the display property. However, the difference is that if you set display:none, it hides the entire element, while visibility:hidden means that the contents of the element will be invisible, but the element stays in its original position and size. W3school

Display specifies how an element should be displayed, visibility makes an element hidden. Visibility will not affect the layout (so I recommend you to use it most of the time)

We have a lot of different display values, full list on w3school.

Also, I have to add, with "display: none" the element is still present in the DOM, with that if you set a button or a href link to "display: none" is still clickable even if it is not visible.
Thanks to @aspiiire 🔥 for telling me.


Hope this helped and thanks for reading!

Please smash that like button to make me understand that you want the series to continue :)


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Top comments (8)

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aspiiire profile image
Aspiiire

Cool article, I would add that with "display: none" the element is still present in the DOM, with that I mean that if you set a button or a href link to "display: none" is still clickable even if it is not visible. 🙂

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lorenzoblog profile image
Lorenzo

Thanks! I mentioned you in the article.

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aspiiire profile image
Aspiiire

Thank you so much DevLorenzo 😀

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mafee6 profile image
Mafee7

Use

elem.style.display = "none"

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

I see some people using left:-9999px;.

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lorenzoblog profile image
Lorenzo

And I don't see where the problem is 🙃

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sinisimattia profile image
Mattia Sinisi

I love how short and to the point your articles are

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lorenzoblog profile image
Lorenzo • Edited

Thanks! This series has the rule of never exceeding 20 lines of code. I try to respect it almost always.