hide(&$element)
Hides an element from later rendering.
The first time render() or drupal_render() is called on an element tree, as each element in the tree is rendered, it is marked with a #printed flag and the rendered children of the element are cached. Subsequent calls to render() or drupal_render() will not traverse the child tree of this element again: they will just use the cached children. So if you want to hide an element, be sure to call hide() on the element before its parent tree