Hide something with CSS without display:none or JavaScript

Question

How can I hide the div without using display:none or JavaScript?

In my country, a lot of Blackberrys come with the CSS support disabled (the mobile companies here are not so good to developers). I have text that says

<div class="BBwarn">
please activate your css support and a link
</div>

I want to hide that once the user activates CSS support, but i can't use display:none; because it is only supported in BB firmware 4.6. It is a public site and I can't make all my visitors upgrade.

Does anybody knows a solution to this? I hope the question is easier to understand now.

Update: Thank you all for the answers but I can't use

• position:absolute
• overflow

because they are available from Blackberry firmware 4.6 and up

Answer 1

You could position it absolutely off the screen.

But I, also, am not a mobile developer.

Answer 2

This is a common way: margin-left: -9999;

Answer 3

visibility: hidden; will work, but the space taken up by that particular div will still appear. If you are going to use the negative left-margin method, remember that you will need to set the object's position to absolute.

Answer 4

Sorry @Shog9 this is my first question here

Ok to clarify

In my country a lot of Blackberrys come with the css disabled (the mobile companies here are not so good to developers) I have a text that says

<div class="BBwarn">
please activate your css support and a link
</div>

I want to hide that once you activate the css support but i cant use display:none; because it is only supported in BB firmware 4.6. It is a public site and I can't make all my visitors upgrade

Does anybody knows a solution to this ? I hope the question is easier to understand now

Answer 5

<div style="height:0;width:0;overflow:hidden;">
<!-- content here -->
</div>

Incidentally, this is what I do to preload images, which is nice because it doesn't use javascript.

Visibility:hidden won't do the same thing because some browsers are smart and won't make the request unless it thinks its actually visible.

Answer 6

things to try:

• use the z-index to put it behind some other element
• move it off the screen by absolute positioning
• visbility: hidden
• make the content "invisible" by setting background to foreground color (works only for text)
• opacity: 0

but the real question is: why?

Answer 7

Why not try the simple:

position: absolute;
left: -1000px;

I can't see why it wouldn't work.

Answer 8

Do you also have to activate Javascript? You could just remove the div with javascript in the onfocus. (I'm expecting this only works in 4.6)

Answer 9

How about:

  visibility: hidden;

That should hide the DIV, (note how it will still be rendered but be invisible, that means it will take space in the document as if it was visible, but be invisible (unlike display:none; where the div will not be rendered)).

Answer 10

I assume You don't want to use JavaScript because the Blackberrys don't support it.

What about if you did the opposite and displayed the block of code with JavaScript, rather than tried to hide it?

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
document.open();
document.writeln('<div class="BBwarn">');
document.writeln('please activate your css support and a link');
document.writeln('</div>');
document.close();
//--></script>

This is a bit of a hack, but would not display the text with disabled JavaScript...

Answer 11

I'm not sure of the percentages you're talking about that are using < 4.6, but if it's that important to you, then I can see a rationale for accepting that you can't please all the people all the time, and an acceptable cascading solution to this should be achievable. Probably with a link to explain the benefits of upgrading and enabling css.

height: 0; 
overflow: hidden;
visibility: hidden; 
color: #fff; 
background: #fff;

BTW - you'd better make sure that you're css is good if you're telling someone to turn it on... :-)

Cheers,
Steve

Answer 12

What makes you think display: none is not supported before version 4.6? Did you test that, or are you going by their documentation?

I'm not a mobile developer either, so I'm just going by what I gleaned from the documentation.

The BlackBerry Browser 4.6 CSS Reference indeed mentions "Availability: BlackBerry® Device Software version 4.6 or later" for the display property, but their BlackBerry Browser 4.3 Content Developer Guide indicates that 4.3 already supported a very limited version of the display property, including display: none. Versions before 4.3 don't support the display property (again, going by the BlackBerry Browser developer documentation).

Can you assume your users do at least have firmware version 4.3, or is that just as unacceptable as assuming they have 4.6?

Have you tried simply setting the width and height to zero? I'm not familiar with the BlackBerry (Browser), but I'm sceptically assuming its CSS support is less than perfect, certainly on the older versions. I wouldn't be surprised if this worked:

.BBwarn {
    display: none; /* for 4.6 and up */
    width: 0px;    /* for 4.3 */
    height: 0px;
}

But then width and height are only supported on all elements starting from version 4.3. Before that they could only be applied to <button> and <img> tags and some <input> types (according to the documentation).

So perhaps the safest way to really make it work on all BlackBerry firmware versions is to use an image for the warning, and use CSS to set its width and height to zero.

If an image is not an option (due to lozalization issues or so, perhaps), an ugly hack might be to specify an empty/illegal image source and put the warning text in the alt attribute. I don't know if setting its width and height to zero would still hide that alt text then.

Answer 13

What exactly is wrong with (the earlier mentioned)

width: 0 height:0 visibility: hidden

Answer 14

width: 0 height:0 visibility: hidden

...Does not always work with firmware 2.2 and older. Sometimes you can get an element to be hidden, but it will reappear with certain keystrokes (like underscore, for instance).

Answer 15

Or you could use Please enable Javascript

And use an image that reads "Enable CSS" and style it using "display:none".

So that whenever the corresponding feature is enabled these warnings wont show.

Alternately, I presume you are using some server side code? You could try detecting for the most common known platforms that support specific versions of css/javascript and deliver content accordingly. You might not even have to write it all yourself.