Combining CSS with bespoke software

A company is currently training me to use their bespoke website design software and they want it to get along with CSS.

Part of this involves me using CSS to get rid of the blank strip of space supposedly ‘deleted’ menu items leave behind.

This is the first time this has been an issue for me, normally I’d just delete the menu item cleanly in HTML.

Best I can tell, setting the background declaration in the ul a style to no-repeat should sort things out but I could do with a second opinion.

Is there another/more correct method of doing this in CSS.

you are possibly just deleting the content of a tag, but leaving the tag in place. CSS will not sort this, editing the source code will.

Sounds about right, but they’re expecting me to deal with it using CSS and I don’t have accsess to the source code.

It’s not really clear what the issue is here. Are you saying there’s an empty UL on the page? At any rate, if needed, you could target an element you want to remove visually and set it to display: none, or you could also set it to

position: absolute;
left: -9999px;

I believe the OP is saying he can’t go about id attribute all the time, since it’s unrealistic all menu items will have ids, but he also wants a pure CSS alternative.

From what I understand so far, I really don’t see how this can be done, only by CSS. Unless you do have an id for each menu item, and if you can’t touch the html, then all it’s left is javascript DOM manipulation of some sort to remove the element or javascript id attribute value modification to make the menu item act as a target for a CSS declaration display:none.

It is basically a dead-end, CSS cannot remove any content and what happens when a user agent doesn’t have CSS enabled?

They have done nothing but fiddle with presentation as a hack rather than actually deal with the content itself leading to pointless bloated code. They seriously need to rethink their logic with the program itself.

Well I found a workaround by changing the colour of the dead menu space to match the background colour!

Now to sort the out of whack margins!