Hidden text

For use of hidden text in Wikipedia, see Help:Hidden text.

Hidden text is computer text that is displayed in such a way as to be invisible or unreadable. Hidden text is most commonly achieved by setting the font color to the same color as the background, rendering the text invisible unless the user highlights it.

Hidden text can serve several purposes. Often web sites use it to disguise spoilers for readers who do not wish to read that text. Hidden text can also be used to hide data from users who are less Internet-savvy or who are not familiar with a particular website. An example of this practice is to display an FTP password in hidden text to reduce the number of users who are able to access downloads and thereby save bandwidth.

It is also used by websites as a spamdexing technique to fill a page with keywords that a search engine will recognize but are not visible to a visitor. However, Google has taken steps to prevent this by parsing the color of text as it indexes it and checking to see if it is transparent, giving those pages much lower rankings.^{[citation needed]}

Compare with metadata, which is usually also hidden, but is used for different purposes.

Hidden characters are characters that are required for computer text to render properly but which are not a part of the content, so they are hidden. This includes characters such as those used to add a new line of text or to add space between words, commonly referred to as "white space characters".

See also

• Comment (computer programming)