Offscreen, not invisible.

Ran into this .. had a container that I was hiding with visibility:hidden, while loading markup into it.

Worked great except, of course, for all versions of IE. IE wouldn't show the badge until you moused over it. I tried all the usual IE slap-in-the-face-so-you-behave tricks to no avail (zoom, position, z-index, background, borders).

So I chose to hide the container by positioning it offscreen with left:-9999px. Bingo.

The particular content I was loading was a linkedin iframe badge - the "inline" version off their developer api page. I was loathe to switch over to the "popup" version, and am glad I dodged that bullet.

ie6 + position:fixed nugget

Anyone who hates css expressions .. feel free to leave now, and end up doing the same thing in a more convoluted manner in 'regular' javascript. If it eases your conscience any -- I know it does mine -- this css is sourced in a conditional comment just for ie6

#my-fixed-position-element{
    top:expression(Math.max(document.documentElement.scrollTop + (document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].offsetHeight / 2), 20) + 'px');
}