Question

Sometimes when I can’t find the way of deactivating a function or any other elements with PHP, specially in PHP frameworks and PHP CMSs, I just do display: none, I wonder if this will cause me many problems in the future or is a necessary method?

Answer 1

It depends on what kinds of elements they are.

Possible problems that come to mind are:

• an img tag or some other tag pointing to an external resource: it will be loaded nevertheless
• the same applies to iframe tags – the embedded page will be loaded even when display: none is set
• Hidden elements’ contents may still turn up in search engines
• If CSS is turned off in a client, the element will still be visible
• Automated clients parsing the DOM may not realize an element is hidden
• The element will still exist in the eyes of any JavaScript doing DOM manipulations

other than these special cases, it will probably not be a problem.