How Can I Hide Text Nodes in an Element Using CSS While Keeping Other Elements Visible?

Targeting Text Nodes within Elements

CSS allows you to style specific elements and their children, but what if you want to hide or manipulate the text within an element while leaving the surrounding elements visible? Consider this HTML:

<div>
<p>The goal is to hide the text "Click to close" without affecting the div or the link within it.</p>
<p><strong>Utilizing Visibility</strong></p>
<p>The visibility property can hide or show elements. However, unlike the display property, visibility can be set individually for child elements. This allows you to selectively hide text nodes:</p>
<pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false">#closelink {
  visibility: collapse;
}

#closelink a {
  visibility: visible;
}

In this example, the visibility of the div (#closelink) is "collapsed," hiding its entire contents, including text nodes. However, the visibility of the link within the div (a) is set to "visible," overriding the parent's visibility and revealing the link and its contained text.

This technique effectively conceals text nodes while preserving the visibility of surrounding elements, providing a quick and easy solution for fine-grained content manipulation in CSS.