There are two ways to add the visibility attribute for an element. They have a difference in the way it renedered in the HTML as shown below.
1. $("#elementid").attr("style", "visibility: hidden")
This will be rendered as
style="visibility: hidden;"
2. $("#elementid").css("visibility", "hidden")
This will be rendered as
style="width: 50px; color: red; visibility: hidden;"
In summary the first one will set the style attribute and the second one will append to the existing style attribute.
Cheers
Samihta