Re: Interaction with invisible elements

• From: Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>
• Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 15:11:48 +0100
• To: Eric Meyer <emeyer@theopalgroup.com>
• Cc: <www-style@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <4.1.20010305150642.03c0ddc0@mail.knowscape.net>

At 08:57 05/03/2001 -0500, Eric Meyer wrote:
>At 22:50 -0800 3/4/01, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>Mozilla treats elements that are 'visibility: hidden' as if they were not
>>available for user interaction because it is very bad UI to have invisible
>>elements react to the user. We decided that good UI was overall a better
>>aim than the few edge cases. ;-)
>>
>>Authors of other UAs probably did the same.
>
>    An interesting assertion.  Why is it bad UI?  I can think of at 
>least a few cases where you might want to have invisible elements 
>that can react to the user's input.

That's quite true. I've often found it useful in SVG (for values of often
relative to the youth of SVG) to use invisible elements that accept events
for visible elements. There can be various reasons for that which I won't
go into, but it seems a fairly natural pattern to use under certain
circumstances.

Of course, SVG has opacity and that's what we use, not visibility.

-- robin b.
"Oh no not again !" said the bowl of petunias

Received on Monday, 5 March 2001 09:09:52 UTC