Annoyed by Opacity
Am I the only person annoyed by how the CSS opacity property is automatically inherited by an element’s children, and it can’t be overridden in the child elements by any means? This is one of the most obnoxious limitations to a CSS property that I’ve ever encountered.
Seriously, why prevent that? I’d initially hazard a guess that it was due to technical limitations, but CSS3’s rgba colors don’t suffer from the same limitation. Too bad rgba colors aren’t universally supported yet.
Then again, neither is opacity.
-sigh-
I wonder if IE8 will support either, although frankly, if they’re going to step up to the big kid’s table, I’d rather see them implement rgba colors first.
‘opacity’ operates exactly the same way ‘visibility’ does in this regard, and was more or less specced to act as a form of variable visibility. If you set a paragraph to be hidden, you can’t make its links visible. Similarly, if you make a paragraph half-opaque, you can’t make its links more opaque than that. Although you should be able to make them less opaque, come to think of it. As in, set the paragraph to be half-opaque and the links to be half-opaque: that should make the links less opaque than just setting the paragraph half-opaque.
But anyway, think of it as variable visibility and you’re set. RGBa operates a different way, in part to make it more powerful and flexible than ‘opacity’, which is kind of a blunt instrument (just like ‘visibility’).
That does make sense. I guess I just wish that all the modern browsers were already using the scalpel (RGBa), and not just the blunt hammer of opacity… although come to think of it, IE doesn’t even have the hammer.
Here’s hoping IE8 is improved in that regard. Not that I’m holding my breath.