Re: Mistake in SVG 1.1 (Second Edition) spec

Display is specified as “Inherited: no” and visibility as “Inherited: yes”.
The wording “Note that 'visibility' is not an inheritable property.” means
that if the visibility is specified on an element, that element does not
inherit from a parent element, and the value cannot be overridden by a
parent. It is well explained in the text above.

It seems as the original authors (since v 1.0) wanted to stress the
distinction between inherited and inheritable. Visibility is not
inheritable in all senses, it is only inherited. Of course, anything could
always be explained more extensively, or reformulated, but given that the
authors cared about writing that sentence, with emphasis on “not”, to
simply take it out seems a little done away with. The sentence is a
clarification in itself against behavior that could be expected but should
not be. The behavior of visibility did cause some headaches at the
beginning due
to wrong expectations related to inheritance.

If it’s true that the difference between visibility and display is also
referenced elsewhere, this is where the two properties are actually
specified, the right place.
Domenico Strazzullo

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 10:10 AM, Ivan Gagis <igagis@gmail.com> wrote:

> As for me, it is ok to just remove the sentence. No idea what was the
> intention of the sentence, but It does not look correct as
> 'visibility' is inheritable in all senses.
> Differences between 'visibility' and 'display' arewell described by
> other text around.
>
> --
> Ivan
>
> 2018-03-06 3:23 GMT+02:00 Daniel Holbert <dholbert@mozilla.com>:
> > I'm not entirely sure what that sentence intended to say, offhand.  It
> > might just want to be removed?
> >
> > Both of these properties (both "visibility" and "display") are
> > "inheritable" (in the sense that "inherit" can be specified on the child
> > and does what you'd expect, style-system-wise).
> >
> > Maybe the spec really meant to point out that "display" is not inherited
> > by default (and yet it still hides its whole subtree)? (Unlike
> > "visibility", which *is* inherited by default but only operates with its
> > computed value on a per-element level.)  That is indeed a difference
> > which would be relevant to point out in this chunk of spec text.
> >
> > ~Daniel
> >
> > On 3/3/18 8:26 AM, Ivan Gagis wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I found an error in SVG 1.1 (Second Edition) spec.
> >>
> >> The error is in this chapter:
> >> https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/painting.html#VisibilityControl
> >>
> >> At the end of the first bullet of the list it says "Note that
> >> ‘visibility’ is not an inheritable property.".
> >> Perhaps, it should be about 'display' property instead of 'visibility'
> >> because 'visibility' is listed as inheritable later.
> >>
> >> Br,
> >> Ivan
> >>
> >>
>
>