Twitter Bootstrap alert message close and open again

Data-dismiss completely removes the element. Use jQuery’s .hide() method instead.

The fix-it-quick method:

Using inline javascript to hide the element onclick like this:

<div class="alert" style="display: none"> 
    <a class="close" onclick="$('.alert').hide()">×</a>  
    <strong>Warning!</strong> Best check yo self, you're not looking too good.  
</div>

<a href="#" onclick="$('alert').show()">show</a>

http://jsfiddle.net/cQNFL/

This should however only be used if you are lazy (which is no good thing if you want an maintainable app).

The do-it-right method:

Create a new data attribute for hiding an element.

Javascript:

$(function(){
    $("[data-hide]").on("click", function(){
        $("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()
        // -or-, see below
        // $(this).closest("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()
    })
})

and then change data-dismiss to data-hide in the markup. Example at jsfiddle.

$("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()

This will hide all elements with the class specified in data-hide, i.e: data-hide="alert" will hide all elements with the alert class.

Xeon06 provided an alternative solution:

$(this).closest("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()

This will only hide the closest parent element. This is very useful if you don’t want to give each alert a unique class. Please note that, however, you need to place the close button within the alert.

Definition of .closest from jquery doc:

For each element in the set, get the first element that matches the selector by testing the element itself and traversing up through its ancestors in the DOM tree.