Setting visibility with SPAN under NS 4x, 6x

Hi,

Im currently working on a project with JavaApplets.
Because they are displayed as gray boxes on loading I used a Span style=hidden
to make them invisible. It works fine with MSIE but the curtain is not revealed
on netscape browsers. The tag i use is document.getElementById("curtain").style.visibility
="visible";
where curtain is the id of the applet within the span tags.
Is there a possibility to change the span=hidden attribute with netscape
or any other to reveal and hide the applet without using layers?

thanks in advance for your replies, alex