How do I select the first adjacent sibling?

Question

I have an HTML list like so:

  
Heading 1
  


        

Answer 1

It is possible to target first sibling with CSS, with some limitations.

For the example in the question it could be done with something like this

li.heading { display: none; }                   /* apply to all elements */
li.heading + li.heading { display: list-item }  /* override for all but first sibling */

This works, but requires that you can explicitly set the styles on the siblings to override the setting for first child.