Re: visible attribute

Curt,
Personally, I agree with your sentiments, but in the spirit of
compatibility with other W3C efforts, SVG's ability to turn visibility
on/off is a bit clunky. Generally, it is sufficient for what people need to
do.

SVG actually uses two properties defined in CSS2, either of which can be
used to make an element appear/disappear: 

'display' - a value of 'none' causes the element to disappear (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/styling.html#DisplayProperty)

'visibility' - a value of 'hidden' causes the element to disappear (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/painting.html#VisibilityProperty)

In the world of using CSS formatting of textual-oriented languages such as
HTML, these two properties have different meanings. 'display' causes an
element to be hidden and not take up space. 'visibility' causes an element
to be hidden, but it still uses up space in terms of CSS2 box model text
layout.

In the world of SVG, there isn't a flow model, so these two attributes are
not differentiated based on how they affect layout.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

At 10:26 AM 3/7/00 -0700, Arnold, Curt wrote:
>It should be a fairly common thing for certain layers of a graphic
>to be hidden from display or made visible in response to check box
>events in the containing HTML form.
>
>Currently, the only apparent mechanism to enable or display
>visibility is to manipulated the "display" fragment of the style
>to and from a value of "none".  This appears to me to be a little
>too complex and error-prone and it would be useful to have
>an explicit boolean property "visible" with a default value of true
>on the styleable elements.
> 

Received on Tuesday, 7 March 2000 14:18:04 UTC