Preloading HTML Content with CSS

When we’re dealing with the common task of fetching some dynamic content to our Web pages to make them more appealing and juicy to visitors, usually we retrieve some database records with dynamic information, properly format them for visual presentation, and finally deliver the visual output to the user’s browser. We congratulate ourselves for that efficient and versatile process; it’s really a nice and straightforward task.

Although most well-structured websites heavily rely on database contents, at times, it’s necessary and even desirable to expose some dynamic content based on client-side techniques. JavaScript becomes extremely handy when we’re dealing with this scenario, since it is used extensively for displaying content on demand in our Web pages. However, one of the great drawbacks of using JavaScript to perform that task is that all of the contents have to be stored in variables, within the scripts. This approach makes adding and updating content a very painful and annoying experience.

With the help of CSS, we can improve this situation. CSS helps us to break out of some of the intrinsic JavaScript limitations, so that common HTML content can be displayed dynamically accordingly to the logic of the master script, without having to deal directly with JavaScript variables. This way, updating or adding content to our Web page can be a more pleasant process.

Over the next few paragraphs, we’ll be demonstrating how to preload regular HTML content by hiding it from view initially, utilizing the well supported CSS attribute display: none. By implementing this attribute, we can selectively hide different sections of Web pages, and then programmatically bring them back to life, according to the script’s logic. With the core idea in hand, we’ll see some examples employing this CSS technique, proving how powerful it can be. So, let’s move on to find out more.