- On hiding text, see Help:Hidden text
 | As of December 29, 2006, this technique is disabled on this wiki. The class hiddenStructure still exists in the CSS, but now outlines the text in green instead of hiding the text. This is to find any remaining instances of hiddenStructure in templates. Note that this only disables use of the CSS class hiddenStructure. It does not prevent use of similar tags like display: none or visibility: hidden. These still cause accessibility problems, and should be used with caution (see "other uses" section below). |
 | This form of syntax is highly frowned upon, and it should not be used. Due to browsers that don't support CSS, and other devices such as screen readers, using this syntax results in vastly inferior pages for many users. The below is documented for informational purposes only. |
 | This page has been closed down by community consensus, and is retained only for historical reference. If you wish to restart discussion on the status of this page, seek community input at a forum such as the village pump. |
By using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it is possible to hide text in templates from popular web browsers, dependent upon the emptiness of a template parameter. Please, don't use it. This page documents a specific highly controversial method to achieve that.
Brion VIBBER [1], lead developer of MediaWiki, describes some of the problems with hiddenStructure.
...it's using a CSS hack to hide structure elements, which can fail for text browsers, plaintext renderings of articles, and any HTML display of the article that doesn't use the stylesheet on this site. This harms both the primary site's accessibility and offsite reuse of material.
Graham87 [2], a blind Wikipedian, discusses screen reading software and the limitations therein, and also states that he doesn't believe we should use CSS hacks.
...I would strongly recommend that the css hacks not be used because there will be a sizable number of people using older screen readers, and they may not be able to upgrade.