On 10/24/07, microUgly <drworm@...2123...> wrote:
As a developer it's easy for you to understand because you know colour is not RGBA. It's RGB and fill-opacity, where fill-opacity is a parameter that applies to any fill whether it is flat colour, gradient or pattern.
Exactly. There's no RGBA in SVG. But representing color+opacity as RGBA is often convenient, so it's used in the UI.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if colour is controlled using "Opacity" or "Fill-opacity" - there is little difference. But it does matter how the GUI changes to reflect this to the users. Any changes that is going to twist the users brain to understand is not a good change. So my question is, does the GUI need to change at all?
Maybe not. But it's not really changing in any big way, in fact.
Is there any reason why the Alpha slider cannot be mapped to "opacity" instead of "fill-opacity"?
No because it's on the fill or stroke tab, and thus must apply to fill and stroke only. And outside of these tabs, we already have the Opacity slider. The only partially sensible idea would be to remove the A:, but I don't want to go that far because, no matter how rarely, it's necessary (for example to eliminate or adjust fill/stroke opacity in those old or non-Inkscape files which already use it).