Equivalent of jQuery .hide() to set visibility: hidden

If you only need the standard functionality of hide only with visibility:hidden to keep the current layout you can use the callback function of hide to alter the css in the tag. Hide docs in jquery

An example :

$('#subs_selection_box').fadeOut('slow', function() {
      $(this).css({"visibility":"hidden"});
      $(this).css({"display":"block"});
});

This will use the normal cool animation to hide the div, but after the animation finish you set the visibility to hidden and display to block.

An example : http://jsfiddle.net/bTkKG/1/

I know you didnt want the $("#aa").css() solution, but you did not specify if it was because using only the css() method you lose the animation.

There isn't one built in but you could write your own quite easily:

(function($) {
    $.fn.invisible = function() {
        return this.each(function() {
            $(this).css("visibility", "hidden");
        });
    };
    $.fn.visible = function() {
        return this.each(function() {
            $(this).css("visibility", "visible");
        });
    };
}(jQuery));

You can then call this like so:

$("#someElem").invisible();
$("#someOther").visible();

Here's a working example.

You could make your own plugins.

jQuery.fn.visible = function() {
    return this.css('visibility', 'visible');
};

jQuery.fn.invisible = function() {
    return this.css('visibility', 'hidden');
};

jQuery.fn.visibilityToggle = function() {
    return this.css('visibility', function(i, visibility) {
        return (visibility == 'visible') ? 'hidden' : 'visible';
    });
};

If you want to overload the original jQuery toggle(), which I don't recommend...

!(function($) {
    var toggle = $.fn.toggle;
    $.fn.toggle = function() {
        var args = $.makeArray(arguments),
            lastArg = args.pop();

        if (lastArg == 'visibility') {
            return this.visibilityToggle();
        }

        return toggle.apply(this, arguments);
    };
})(jQuery);

jsFiddle.

An even simpler way to do this is to use jQuery's toggleClass() method

CSS

.newClass{visibility: hidden}

HTML

<a href="#" class=trigger>Trigger Element </a>
<div class="hidden_element">Some Content</div>

JS

$(document).ready(function(){
    $(".trigger").click(function(){
        $(".hidden_element").toggleClass("newClass");
    });
});