I often find myself showing/hiding elements with jQuery, for example a simple tabbed content area where the first tab is visible and the others are not until they are displayed with the javascript. I know it's not good practice to hide the initially hidden ones using CSS (display: none) and then showing the correct ones with JS as non-JS users will never see a thing. So by default I show all and then hide the relevant ones with JS.
In doing this though, the hidden elements will load and then only hide when document is ready. How can I stop this happening? Is there a way of doing this in a way that will degrade gracefully but also not have elements appearing whilst loading, and then promptly disappearing as this looks a bit shoddy.
a few thoughts...
If you don't mind jQuery being littered all over the page as opposed to being all in a separate file, you can call $('#divToHide').hide(); immediately after the element appears. Not very good practice though. Although it depends on the use case, if you are largely a designer/themer creating a 5 page brochure site, you should choose what is right for you!
Or if you're a bit more of a techie, you might like to mess around with .live()/.livequery() and catch the element's insertion with JS and hide is straight away. See this post Is there a jquery event that fires when a new node is inserted into the dom?