Re: [css-display]? Compositing, expensive things, and laziness

> [A newly show element] might cause the rest of the document to need 
> reflowing.

No, it would still be layouted, just on rendered; ‘invisible’ would not be 
quite the same as ‘display: none’; in fact, you may consider it like 
‘visibility: visible-if-possible’ which evaluates to ‘visibility: visible’ 
if the browser had enough time to paint the element, and to ‘visibility: 
hidden’ if it didn’t. That would not affect the layout. When there's a 
resize, the new layout would be computed, but the element may return to 
invisible (or reuse older frames) if the browser has not time to update its 
rendering.

That may indicate a good name for the property: ‘visibility-hint: auto | 
if-ready | pre-rendered’ where an ‘optional’ element may be invisible even 
if its visibility is visible, and where a ‘pre-rendered’ element may be 
prerendered even if it’s not visible. That yields ‘visbility: visible 
if-ready’ and ‘visibility: hidden pre-rendered’ as new visibility behaviors. 

Received on Saturday, 22 June 2013 12:48:12 UTC