Make a Dom element visible but don't take up space on the page?

Question

What CSS will produce an element but the browser won't take it into account for laying out anything else? Is such a thing possible?

I want the bird and dog on this page to not affect the centering of the text. http://twitter-meme.appspot.com/

Some solutions that I don't like:

• Make a single image and set it as background-image. (Then I end up with a big image as a background).
• Absolutely position the text (Yuck)

Answer 1

You could use position:absolute on the two images by setting the parent div to position:relative and then positioning the images to left:0 and right:0 respectively.

Answer 2

Make the container have position: relative; and then absolutely position the images respective to the container.